GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
STUDENT SPEECH AT RECOGNITION CEREMONY
The honor of giving an address at the end of the year SPE recognition ceremony is determined by three criteria: a student’s expressed commitment to the values of justice, freedom, and challenging conventional wisdom that epitomize GPIA, their academic performance, and their compelling vision of international affairs.
The Graduate Programs in International Affairs student speech at the at the Recognition Ceremony of the Schools of Public Engagement, May 16 was delivered by Anh Lê on behalf of a collective of students within the GPIA class of 2024. Anh is a designer and researcher whose work focuses on labor, migration, and digital justice. While at The New School, they were a Research Assistant for the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence. They were awarded a 2023 DWeb Fellowship with the Internet Archive and participated in the Berkman Klein Center’s research sprint on digital identity in times of crisis. Prior to graduate school, Anh worked on strategic communications and digital campaigns with organizations including Community Tech NY, Mekong NYC, and the Southeast Asian Freedom Network. Anh is speaking to you as a child of Vietnamese refugees who were displaced from their homeland by US imperialism in Southeast Asia. Anh hopes to convey what it means politically and materially for them to be here today. Being an Asian American person and a student of international affairs means uplifting and building solidarity with decolonial struggles across the globe – from Vietnam to Palestine to Sudan to Haiti and beyond.
To preface, I’d like to acknowledge that even though I’m the one speaking to you today, these words are not only mine. I’m speaking to you as part of a collective within GPIA, made up of students who all deserve to be up here and who have positively changed this institution in many more ways than I ever could alone.
Because of our administration’s decision to call police on students, to suppress free speech, and defend Zionist violence, my classmates and I risk our personal safety and livelihoods when we speak up publicly about Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza.
With my relative privilege as an American citizen and with the support of my co-conspirators, I hope I can adequately convey our collective message to you all.
First, because we work in international affairs, it makes sense to start by discussing some actual international affairs:
- Yesterday, the State of Israel continued to escalate its military assault on Rafah in the south of Gaza, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee. Since October, at least 35,000 innocent people, including over 14,000 children, have been murdered by the Israeli occupation forces.
- Yesterday marked the 76th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba, or “catastrophe”, in which the State of Israel ethnically cleansed and violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. These Palestinian refugees carry a collective, intergenerational trauma and to this day continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlers.
- Today, students across the United States, including the brave students and faculty at The New School, are holding down encampments to express their anger, grief, and disgust in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They call on their universities to divest from death.
- Today, there are no universities left in Gaza. Once a thriving center for education in the Middle East, Gaza was previously home to 12 universities.
I urge us all to reflect and acknowledge the Class of 2024 in Gaza that no longer exists. An entire generation of students will never get to graduate.
We bring up these points not only to center Gaza during this ceremony, but because we need to think about what it means for us to be practitioners of international affairs. Why did we choose this field if we can’t bravely confront unsettling truths, acknowledge grave harms, and come together to build a more liberated world? How do we ask hard questions of the institutions that we are meant to join, support, and transform in our careers?
To the class of 2024, those walking today and everyone who couldn’t physically be here: we promise you’re not alone. You’re not the only ones feeling sad and overwhelmed. We’re witnessing mass atrocities in real time, clear institutional failures, crises of governance, and lack of moral leadership from people we maybe once considered allies and experts in our field.
To confront this moment, let’s consider what it means to disrupt. (How many graduation speeches, academic lectures, and TED talks have you sat through where they tell you to go out there and change the world? Be “disrupters”?) One of my classmates recounted their recent trip to Palestine, which is part of our International Field Program. During the first week, the Palestinian community was on strike because a group of teenagers had been killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Yesterday, on Nakba Day, the IOF killed another protesting student at Birzeit University in the West Bank, and the school is on strike to mourn his death.
In the news and in our New School inboxes, we constantly see protests and strikes framed as disruptions. But these disruptions are met with scorn. We get angry that our ceremonies and classes are interrupted. We feel inconvenienced when our commutes are blocked. Though is it really disruption when people are mourning, grieving, and protesting their oppression? Is it disruption when people care so much that they put their bodies on the line in the hopes of saving a life or protecting a community?
Disruption is when the settler colonial state can invade campuses at will and arrest protesting students, early in the morning when they’re peacefully sleeping. Disruption is when the state raids villages and robs people of their land. When it shoots innocent kids playing on the street. When it criminalizes people at borders and checkpoints. When it takes away access to libraries, healthcare, and education in order to build prisons. Students protesting against a school’s complicity in genocide is not disruption. We need to question what we consider the norm. Social and educational institutions profiteering from war crimes cannot be the norm. They are the disruptors, not us. Capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism – all words we’ve heard and dissected in our classes. We know these norms have brutally disrupted numerous communities across the globe. From Palestine to the Congo to Sudan to Turtle Island and New York, land of the Lenape people at the heart of empire. These systems of power have robbed us of our ability to dream and think beyond their version of normal.
So how can we envision alternative ways of knowing, being, living, and doing? We need to shift the paradigm. Resistance is a reaction to injustice. We need to focus on liberation. On creating actual communities of care and ways of self-governance. On healing the social and environmental fractures that disrupt our community bonds. On reclaiming public space and resources for the public good. Our demand is for the here and now, even as we rebuild for the future. I have faith in us, the class of 2024. Over the last few weeks, I’ve never connected more deeply with you all than in our organizing meetings, where we tried to grapple with the NYPD raid on campus and build solidarity with our arrested classmates. I had never even met some of you before. But when we needed each other, we showed up. And we’re not alone. Our professors showed up for us too (so thank you GPIA faculty, truly)!
A movement is blooming all around us. Together, we can ensure that violent disruptions like police on campus will not become the norm. We can build a world where our American tax dollars don’t fund genocide abroad, where Palestinians can peacefully return to their homeland, where our decisions and actions do bring about decolonial change. We have the skills, knowledge, and experience to do all that and more. We can set us free. Thank you, and congratulations to the Class of 2024.
FREE, FREE PALESTINE!