Rejecting Complicity: ScholCommLab’s Statement of Support for PACBI Principles

In the wake of the genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, the Scholarly Communications Lab (ScholCommLab) asserts its commitment to align its activities with the principles laid out by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which “advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law.” 

We make this commitment in light of overwhelming evidence that Israel is committing scholasticide—the deliberate destruction of education—in Gaza. Every university in Gaza has been obliterated, alongside the majority of Gaza’s 564 school buildings, libraries, and cultural heritage sites. As a result, 625,000 students are now deprived of their education, while tens of thousands have been killed, including hundreds of educators.

This devastation stands in direct opposition to the values upon which the ScholCommLab was founded. From its inception, the Lab has sought to create a space of care and solidarity within academic systems that are often shaped by hierarchical and exclusionary structures, inequity, and institutional violence—particularly toward early career scholars and those from marginalized backgrounds. Similarly, our scholarly work calls for a reimagining of scholarly communication systems to support equity, openness, and participation—principles that cannot be reconciled with the systematic erasure of educational infrastructure and academic life. 

We make this commitment now, in part, because the academic institutions we are embedded in (SFU and uOttawa) have failed to take action. Despite overwhelming evidence of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, many universities—including our own—continue to normalize relations with Israeli institutions complicit in apartheid and settler colonial violence. In the absence of meaningful institutional response, we believe it is our responsibility to exercise our academic freedom to apply pressure—such as through support for the PACBI campaign. 

By endorsing PACBI, we aim to challenge not only the role of Israeli academic institutions in sustaining oppression, but also the inaction of our own institutions, which maintain partnerships and policies that sanitize state violence. While we recognize that the ScholCommLab’s boycott may not carry the same institutional weight as that of a university, we issue this statement to reject complicity, to draw attention to the ongoing supression of pro-Palestinian voices at academic institutions across the Global North, and to affirm that exercising academic freedom in the face of genocide is not only a right, but a responsibility.

Unlike other units at our universities—such as the Public Knowledge Project at SFU, with which we share members—the ScholCommLab retains the institutional positioning and academic freedom to speak out. We use this voice to call on academic institutions, including our own, to reflect on their inaction. At the same time, we affirm our commitment—as a scholarly collective—to the principles outlined by PACBI and to upholding the fundamental moral responsibilities of the modern university.

Concretely, the ScholCommLab pledges that its members will not use their Lab affiliation or any of their Lab-affiliated work for any of the following purposes:

• Accept invitations to visit Israeli academic institutions;
• Participate in conferences funded, organized, or sponsored by the State of Israel or Israeli universities, or otherwise connected to Israeli academic institutions;
• Apply for, partner with, or accept any funding coming from Israeli academic institutions;
• Publish our work in journals or other venues affiliated with Israeli academic institutions;
• Participate in exchanges of students and/or staff with Israeli academic institutions;
• Accept academic or comparable prizes awarded by any Israeli institutions. 

In making these commitments, we acknowledge that this statement may not necessarily reflect individual views of all members affiliated with the Lab; Nonetheless, all members agree to uphold these principles in our shared work and engagements. These commitments target Israeli academic and cultural institutions, and do not extend to collaborations between individual scholars or cultural workers whose work may be aligned with the ScholCommLab’s commitments and express solidarity with the cause for Palestinian liberation.