Sociologists for Palestine

@soc4pal.bsky.social

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Sociologists for Palestine (S4P) is a democratic and plural collective of sociologists who support the cause of Palestinian liberation. sociologistsforpalestine.org

White background with orange and blue font. The following message can be read: Darializa, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District and Sociology PhD candidate at CUNY, and Nicholas Occhiuto, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and Political Director of Darializa’s campaign, will discuss New York politics, socialism, and the potential of sociological thinking to shape our world. Next to the image of a calendar the following message is displayed: Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Next to the image of a clock the following message is displayed: 12-2 PM. The following address is provided: Auditorium, C-Level, CUNY GRADUATE CENTER, 365 FIFTH AVE - NEW YORK CITY. An image of Darializa is at the center of the flyer.
White background with red decorative lines around the flyer, a green circle and message with black font that states: Volunteer for Sociologists for Palestine! Below text in Black states the following: S4P wants to bring democracy back to ASA! This means amending our current bylaws to ensure the ASA’s leadership cannot unilaterally decide which member resolutions to exclude from the ballot and clarifying the bylaws language. We need your help collecting 10% of our membership signatures for this to become a reality. Can we count on you to help us collect signatures in NYC & make ASA democratic again? Sign up for a canvassing shift here: https://tinyurl.com/S4PCanvassing. A red heart with the colors of the Palestinian flag has a QR code that also leads to the sign-up for the canvassing shifts.
White letters on a red background state the following message: Resisting Authoritarianism: Global Solidarity and Democratic Futures. A Conference for Sociologists. Conference Program, August 10-11, 2026, CUNY Graduate Center, 364 Fifth Ave - New York City.
Red letters on a black background with green hands holding protest signs and a QR code. The following message can be read: Rally for a democratic ASA. Join Sociologists for Palestine’s rally in the middle of the ASA’s conference in NYC! Exact time and location to be announced on Aug. 6. RSVP here: https://tinyurl.com/asaprotest
Red and green illustrations with a black background. A watermelon and QR code are in the center. The following message can be read: Join S4P’s Mentorship Event! Do you want to learn how to be a public scholar, navigate the job market, and more? Are you interested in mentoring the next generation of sociologists? We are organizing a Mentorship event at our alternative conference as part of Sociologists for Palestine’s alternative conference. Please fill out a form if you are interested in participating as a mentee or mentor: https://tinyurl.com/SociologistsForPalestine
We look forward to seeing many members in New York in August for the 2026 ASA Annual Meeting. It is shaping up to be an engaging meeting, and we're excited about the program that has come together. We extend a sincere thank you to the many volunteers who have contributed their time and energy to making this program possible by organizing panels, reviewing submissions, and supporting the meeting in so many ways. These efforts are meaningful and truly appreciated. We understand that some members are choosing to boycott the meeting, while others plan to participate in person as originally intended. If your paper was accepted, you will have a scheduled room and time to present as listed in the online program. This includes sessions where organizers, presiders, or other panelists have chosen not to participate, even if fewer papers are ultimately presented. Please note that to have a presentation count as part of the 2026 Annual Meeting, participants must be registered and follow ASA registration policies, including those for remote presentations. The registration deadline for participants listed on the online Annual Meeting program has been extended to Monday, June 15 to provide additional time to consider the information shared in this email. If you intend to present at the Annual Meeting as scheduled, please register by June 15 (before 11:59 p.m. EST). Finally, we know this has been a challenging period for our association, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and continued engagement. Your feedback and concerns are being heard and taken seriously. We, along with Council, have been listening closely and are engaged in ongoing, thoughtful conversations about how best to move forward. Council will meet in June, ahead of its regularly scheduled August meeting, to support this ongoing effort to work toward a resolution. Please reach out to us directly if you have questions. Best, Heather M. Washington ASA Executive Director Shelley J. Correll ASA President
AGAINST GENOCIDE WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? A Conversation with Sociologists for Palestine In this interactive session, attendees will have the opportunity to engage S4P organizers directly on issues including boycott logistics, tactics and strategy, and support of junior scholars. Though the panelists will provide brief preliminary remarks on why they joined S4P and support the boycott, the emphasis will be on a collective give and take. In doing so, we hope to create a space that prefigures the kind of democratic association we want the ASA to be. Cedric De Leon Heba Gowayed Zachary Levenson Roi Livne MAY 27 8:30AM1-10AM (PDT) | 10:30AM-12PM (CDT) | 11:30AM-1PM (EDT) ZOOM RSVP: TINYURL.COM/5RTW5EKX Read our #BoycottASA FAQ: sociologiststorpalestine.org/asa-boycott S4P
Town hall for sociologists Boycott! On the Palestine exception and the crisis of democracy at the american sociological association. April 14, 2026 4pm PT/ 6 pm CT/ 7pm ET tinyurl.com/boycottasa
Campuses in Florida, Texas, and other states have been purged of sociological reason. Content is being dictated by state and federal government who have also commissioned "politically correct" textbooks. More than ever the American Sociological Association has to choose if it will use data and rationality to take a public stand and protect all social groups including Palestinians or knuckle under to an administration that has no respect for our discipline and in some cases see sociologists as the enemy. Respectfully, Mary
ASA relies on enormous amounts of volunteer labor to function, and we serve gladly because we are a member association; that work may become less attractive and more difficult to justify if the association morphs into a corporation and continues its undemocratic practices. This could be as dangerous a time to be a sociologist as in Germany in the 1930's. The fundamentals of sociological reason and research -- that is, how social systems, structures, and functions work, change, and affect various social groups -- are under attack by our own government. Antisemitism is being callously used as a propaganda weapon to fire university presidents and eliminate social sciences that criticize aspects of domestic or foreign policy.
For several years now, I have been disappointed as the Association moved from being a member's incorporated Association to a Corporation that now relies on lawyers to justify actions not supported by the ASA Bylaws and increasingly centralizes all decision-making processes in the Executive Office thus removing democratic practices. I expressed these concerns in 2017 after the association made a complete transition that removed 10 long term staff members and began ignoring Council decisions made in the past, thus erasing the mechanisms of institutional memory, and eroding ASA's structure as a membership-based organization.
The argument about membership is a red herring. Like other academic associations, ASA has low participation rates in voting. Members vote when issues are important to them or to their sections (and past data show that members identify more with their sections than the overall association). Low membership participation occurs not only when voting on policies but also when voting for elected officers. Yet, I have never heard of our association contemplating not installing an elected officer or rejecting a bylaw revision because only a minority of the total membership voted. While some ASA members may have left in response to the 2024 resolution, there are many who stayed because it did pass. (If the Executive Office and Council were concerned with losing members, they might have considered the consequences of holding annual meetings exclusively on the East Coast and Chicago.)
The letter distributed to the membership selectively chose information that supported a view to justify violating Section 9 of the Bylaws. Over the life of our organization ASA has made numerous statements criticizing human rights violations as they particularly impact sociologists and students. There is ample sociological qualitative and quantitative data that Israel state policy established an apartheid system and are committing genocide against the Palestinian people. We also have ample sociological evidence of the role that institutions, including universities, grants, and scholarship, play in maintaining government policies. The resolution for the ASA Boycott of Israeli academic institutions assures that as an association, our membership does not contribute to or support organizations that participate in genocide, human rights violations or in the current US regime's campaign of scholasticide.
How can ASA support sociology faculty and students when they are unwilling to address policies instigated by a foreign government, in consortium with the US regime that attacks our research, teaching, practice, and funding?
Dear Shelley and Heather, I have been volunteering my time with ASA for two decades. From paying dues to attending the annual conference, from serving as Deputy Editor of an ASA journal (currently) to serving as a council member for a half dozen sections, from working as a section treasurer to serving on years' worth of awards committees, I am deeply invested in the organization. But your message is the last straw. Unless President Correll steps down and this decision is reversed, not only am I planning to leave the organization, but you can expect the many dozens of sociologists l've talk to over the last two days to leave as well. In fact, I have a feeling that President Correll will go down in history as the ASA leader responsible for the largest membership exodus in the organization's history. All in the name of "challenging the status quo"? Shameful. Disgusted, Zach
Hi, if I'm reading the data right, the decline in ASA membership has been underway for a while https://www.asanet.org/data-dashboard-copy/membership-trends-over-the-years-21, and it's not clear how much of the decline between 2023 and 2024 represents a response to the 2024 ceasefire resolution. Do you have a reliable count of the number of people who left because of the resolution? It is of course impossible to know how many would have left had the resolution failed. I'm also curious about the history of votes on member petitions. Can you provide the figures for all member-initiated resolutions corresponding to the ones for the ceasefire resolution: "Only 38.9% of voting members participated in the 2024 election, and among those who voted on the petition (34.3%), 58.8% voted in support of the "Resolution on Palestine." " Thanks much, SG
Statement: ASA members received a deeply troubling and shameful email on March 12th entitled "ASA Policy, Member-led Petitions, and ASA's Future." In the simplest of terms, it is unacceptable to deny ASA members--who used the proper procedure--a vote on the question of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. I support this petition because, as the petition language outlines, Israel is engaged in apartheid, occupation, and genocide against the Palestinian people, including scholasticide. The boycott resolution would hold accountable Israeli universities who are playing a key role in this occupation, apartheid, and genocide/scholasticide. The email from ASA leadership, and the language used in it ("conflict" instead of genocide as one example), is on the wrong side of history. But this is also about democratic governance, Let us have a vote. As a junior scholar who has paid dues for 11 years, is currently organizing a session for New York, serving on an award committee, running for an elected position, and submitting an invited session for 2027, I will be reconsidering the resources (both dues, registration fees, and labor) | give to ASA. If this decision holds, and a democratic election is not allowed, I will be withdrawing my resources from ASA. --Caitlin Schroering
Dear Heather, The past few years have illuminated a great deal to me: whose voices matter in society and whose can be marginalized without second thought. I appreciate the honesty in your email that calling for the end of the worst atrocities against humanity this century is "divisive" whereas the loss of "many" (how many, one wonders?) individuals' dues to a minor professional organization is a tragedy. Please understand: this move from ASA is exactly why so many of us feel utterly disconnected from the organization. I will continue my service on award committees, I will continue in my elected section position, I will continue to review for journals, all because I care deeply about our discipline and the work that sociologists do all over the country. Please do not mistake these dues for a commitment to ASA itself. There are far more important priorities in the world beyond keeping the lights on in some DC office I'll never have a need to visit. One of these is ensuring that our species does all it can to put an end to genocide and war the world over. If your council lacks the moral reasoning to understand how this priority might weigh against ASA's internal organizational decisions, I wonder how we have allowed our organization to fall under such confused leadership. All the best, Mo
Dear Professors Washington and Correll, Were you ashamed while you were writing this blatantly misleading and anti-democratic message? The resolution proposed by the membership petition is clearly about a public policy issue, like many issues on which the ASA has previously taken a stand. You may be opposed to it, but that is for the membership, not the two of you to decide. Sincerely, Joel Andreas Professor of Sociology Johns Hopkins University
Hello, Thank you for this update as it solidifies the position of ASA to bury it's head in the sand while using the language of policy and governance. This clarification from the communications team is timely, and I will not waste my money to renew a membership with ASA. Dr. Florence Castillo
"Dear Heather, As a signatory to the petition and a member of Sociologists for Palestine, I disagree vigorously with this message. I would ask you a few simple questions. In 1968, do you think you would have opposed the war on Vietnam? If you were a member of the ASA at that time, would you have sided with the bold minority of young sociologists who insisted that their professional organization take a stand on the defining issue of the day? And could you honestly say today that that minority of radicals was not proven correct in the judgment of history? I support the petition because I feel that the question of Israel-Palestine is the Vietnam of our time. It is the issue by which posterity will judge us, the issue about which our children will ask: what did you do, when you had the chance? This is not just because of the moral imperative to stop the ongoing genocide of Palestine. It is a pressing issue of global survival. I feel certain that the catastrophe of the Iran war would never have happened if Israel had not been treated with such impunity for its grave crimes since 2023 (and indeed before). This is not an academic matter for sociologists. A world dominated by militarism, genocide, and economic crisis is not one that will be friendly to any forms of critical thought. There is a profound connection between the question of Israel-Palestine and the assault upon academic freedom which ASA and other learned societies have —to their credit — resisted. At this point I don't know how this can be denied. There is a deep contradiction between defending academic freedom, on the one hand, and clamping down on it within our organization, on the other. Under such conditions, "unity" can only be achieved through open dialogue, debate, and indeed democratic conflict, in every domain of civil society - including our profession. It cannot be achieved through bureaucratic recourse and weak talk of "inclusion." The fact that we have a diverse, inclusive discipline at all is the…
Dear Dr. Washington & Dr. Correll, I am shocked at the disdain that ASA leadership appears to have for the democratic process, casting a free and fair voting process as illegitimate because the outcome was contrary to its preference. ASA's actions in casting that election as illegitimate, in refusing to consider the demands of the new petition within the ASA Council, and last year in censoring an obituary by Ruth Milkman for Michael Burawoy that mentioned his support for Palestinian rights -- these do not suggest political neutrality or respect for diversity of opinion. At best, they indicate a fierce commitment to the status quo. Ironic, considering the 2026 meeting theme is "Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting sociology to work for a more equitable society." Who is supposed to put "sociology to work" if not the country's largest association of sociologists? I'm left struggling to see what the purpose of this organization is, or my place within it. I will not be renewing my membership or attending the conference. Regards,
Dear ASA Council, I write to express my deep disappointment at your decision to discard an important petition that has already garnered significant support among the ASA community. I believe it has a real chance to garner the requisite votes and shape ASA's future policy direction should it be put to vote. Your decision to not put the petition to vote on the grounds that it constitutes an operational/governance matter is far from obvious. Numerous academic associations have undertaken precisely the measures that the current petition is advocating. Clearly, for these associations, the matter isn't one of governance but of taking a political, ethical and moral position on a public policy issue. Undoubtedly, these associations determined that the benefits of adopting an ethical stance outweighed the costs. Given this, we can reasonably hold that your invocation of ASA bylaws is wide open to interpretation. The Israeli government (with the complicity of its U.S. counterpart) has perpetrated what numerous experts and bodies (not least Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) have unequivocally termed a genocide. Israel, along with the U.S., is now engaged in unprovoked aggression in Iran and Lebanon that has already killed thousands of innocent civilians. As an association based in the U.S. with a stated mission of driving "positive social change", it is imperative that it take a position - if its members agree, of course - on issues that are going to shape not only the U.S. but the world for generations to come. The proposed petition asking for a boycott of Israeli institutions is a very small step in this direction. As scholars, we know that such boycotts were absolutely critical in building transnational solidarity and ending apartheid in South Africa. This morning, I received an email from ASA with the subject line "Your ASA Membership and the Power of Sociology". I am struck by the contradiction: upholding the strength and relevance of sociology while taking aw…
Gratitude for Pushing Back Against the Activist Tide Also yesterday, my friend and coauthor Shelley Correll, the president of the American Sociological Association, made a bold stand (together with the executive director Heather Washington and ASA Council) against a BDS petition that had been circulating among ASA members. Given my despair over the 2024 ceasefire petition and its aftermath, you can imagine my appreciation for Shelley and her colleagues' leadership. More generally, I hope this is a sign that the tide is turning and that ASA will turn the tide against our beloved discipline becoming a left-wing activist organization rather than one that promotes sociology's capacity to identify and verify deep, hard-to-discern truths about the social world, whatever their political implications.