Winter 2024/25 Organizing Reports
You can find previous organizing reports here. Contact secretary@sciencefothepeople.org to get involved!
Western Mass
UMass Amherst students created their first encampment, a Popular University for Gaza, on April 29, the same day as Western Mass SftP’s People’s Science Fair. Organizers linked the events with solidarity slogans in sidewalk chalk and announcements at the fair. More importantly, some of the encampment organizers representing the STEM Caucus of UMass Dissenters tabled at the fair alongside Demilitarize Western Mass, Ban Killer Drones, Mass Peace Action, Decarcerate Western Mass, and many other community groups. (Dissenters is an antiwar organization that, alongside SJP, had also organized a sit-in in October that resulted in 57 arrests.) Under threat of arrest, organizers dismantled the encampment on the morning of April 30. The second UMass encampment was established on May 7. Members of Western Mass SftP, the STEM Caucus of UMass Dissenters and other allied local organizations intersected with and supported the student encampment and were among the 134 people arrested—in some cases, brutally—by police in riot gear.
Our chapter’s other major contribution last spring was an online workshop, “Social Justice and Science Education,” organized by Chloe Spurr, a UMass graduating senior and Western Mass SftP chapter member. K-12 teachers and college professors presented their experiences and ideas, after which participants discussed how best to incorporate social justice themes into their science curricula.
New York City
The New York City chapter of Science for the People has seen steady activity since its revitalization in April 2023. We have organized events such as book talks, teach-ins, film screenings, and magazine launches, and held consistent bi-monthly meetups in the form of general chapter meetings and reading groups on specific topics such as militarism, food sovereignty, counterinsurgency, and many more.
In the past year, the chapter focused on organizing to support the Palestinian cause, recognizing the importance of mobilizing STEM workers and academics from within the imperial core to undermine US and israeli influence in its renewed effort to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its people. When the most recent and by far the most extensive genocide began, our members attended protests in the city and in Washington DC at events organized by Within Our Lifetime and the Shut It Down coalition, as well as collaborating with DegrowNYC under the slogan, “No Climate Justice on Occupied Land”. We protected each other from the police while reckoning with our own growing consciousness about the need for escalation in the face of state-sponsored genocide.
In February, we organized a counter-recruitment campaign at a Columbia University engineering career fair, sponsored by weapons companies experiencing sky-rocketing stock value due to the sale of weapons and tech to ‘israel’. In collaboration with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and No Tech for Apartheid, attendees were handed information on the supply of 2000 lb bombs used to target Palestinian children by companies at the fair, and were asked to boycott the event.
When the Gaza solidarity encampments took off in the city last April, our members fundraised thousands of dollars, delivered supplies, and reported on police movement to comrades in the Columbia and CUNY encampments. Where possible, members with affiliation helped community members to enter a locked down campus, fighting an outside agitator narrative familiar from Columbia’s occupation in 1968—we are all outside agitators. Our members also co-organized a teach-in on campus with Columbia Researchers Against War, providing a history of Science for the People and its work against the utilization of science and research for war and profit.
Some members began supporting Workshops 4 Gaza, an autonomous initiative that hosts taught workshops in the arts and sciences, coupled with a bookshop. Over $160,000 has been raised for Palestinians through these workshops, directed towards individual families or the Sameer project.
After the brutal repression of the student encampments in May, some of our members connected with other organizers on the ground who were also supporting the encampments and recognized the need to fight for liberation in multiple corridors, to bring together not just activists and organizers but the broader community in the struggle as well. With this in mind, the chapter helped organize The People’s Town Hall, a base-building initiative by autonomous organizers and several grassroots organizations such as NYC Icewatch, Black Men Build, We United, Pueblo Unido, and many more. The bimonthly town hall hosts a food and clothes distribution for communities in Brooklyn, various workshops like community defense and street medic training, and community dialogues on topics such as land stewardship, tenant organizing, and restorative justice. We supported this effort through contributing political education materials, teach-ins, and coordinating the town hall’s logistics.
Through this initiative, we also connected with Interference Archive and Women’s Press Collective. Some of our members visited both organizations’ spaces in Brooklyn and the Bronx to learn about archiving and the workings of an independent printing press. The chapter is building a more solid connection to these groups with regular visits and volunteering. Such spaces should be used to a full extent, given the ever increased monopolization and control of information by corporate media.
Some chapter members also collaborated with Youth Against Sweatshops and Youth Against Displacement in campaigns against exploitation of home care workers and against displacement in Chinatown. We assisted in a home care workers’ hunger strike outside City Hall and spoke at the kickoff gathering, while some of us picketed and flyered outside of the Museum of Chinese American (MoCA) to raise awareness on its complicity in displacing Chinatown community members to build a mega jail within the neighborhood.
In September, members attended a chapter retreat in uptown Manhattan, where we discussed chapter structure, points of unity, and identified different sites of struggle we are engaging in. This brought more focus to chapter organizing and gave us a grounding experience in our collective struggle.
With more active chapter members has come the ability to begin producing agitprop (agitation propaganda), beginning with the revival of Statistics for the People, a bimonthly report on statistics related to capitalism’s impact on different parts of our society. Members distributed flyers on housing statistics in strategic subway lines, with a call to action to organize with tenant groups and unions against skyrocketing rent and dire living conditions.
Another current project is a talk on land and food sovereignty, and the struggle for liberation in Turtle Island and Palestine, in collaboration with CUNY 4 Palestine and Labor 4 Palestine. This event features Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian agroecologist from Bethlehem University and Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild.
Several of our chapter members are involved in digitizing the SftP archive, and we regularly incorporate archive content into our reading groups. This allows us as a chapter to learn from our organization’s political history through both inspiration and critique, and inform where we want to go next. For anyone who wishes to join the New York City chapter, please sign up using our general onboarding form in our linktree (linktr.ee/sftpnyc) or via email at nyc@scienceforthepeople.org. We also post regular updates on instagram (@sftpnyc).
Canada
The call for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle is deeply personal to many of us in SftP Canada and resonates with the anti-imperialist drive at the core of our collective. So when the news broke of the bombing of the Gaza strip and the following invasion, we were driven to action.
It was important for us to platform and amplify Palestinian voices wherever possible, while highlighting the interconnectedness of anti-imperial struggles around the world. Earlier in the year, SftP had sent a small contingent to Cuba for the IPA May Day Brigade, where we met medical students from all around the world studying at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana. There was a sizable cohort of medical students from Gaza and the West Bank, many of whom intended to return after graduation to serve their people. SftP Canada organized a public event called “Science Under Occupation” at Co-op BMP in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) on November 25th, 2023 which platformed three Palestinian medical students from ELAM. They presented over Zoom about their personal experiences witnessing the genocide of their community from abroad, and their hopes for one day returning as medical doctors. They spoke of the cruelty of the occupation, highlighting the links between zionist imperialism and the deteriorating health infrastructure in Gaza and the testing of new weapons technologies on Palestinians. A neuroscientist and SftP magazine contributor also shared her experiences working in agroecology in Palestine, as a member of the Palestinian diaspora based in the US. The event was well-attended by Tiohtià:ke community members active in Palestine solidarity organizing.
Later in the year, when the student encampments arose all over Turtle Island (North America), SftP members set up a tent at McGill University that we called the Zach Hall Centre for Dialectical Biology and Palestinian Liberation (in memory of a member of our chapter who had recently passed away). Back-issues of SftP magazine were donated to the Leila Khaled People’s Library at the encampment. Some members of SftP Canada played a more active supporting role at the encampment through other organizational affiliations (e.g. labor organizations and student unions), and by meeting and learning from other groups, they were able to develop our organizational capacity. Some members also supported a francophone-led encampment at L’Université Populaire Al-Aqsa de l’UQAM (l’Univeristé du Québec à Montréal) in Tiohtià:ke in mid-May, which succeeded in winning most of its demands, including UQAM calling for an immediate ceasefire and allocating a budget for the reception of Palestinian academics and students, before voluntarily dismantling. Organizing for Palestine across linguistic, cultural, and political divisions presents unique challenges and rich learning opportunities for organizers in Tiohtià:ke, a place that has itself experienced multiple layers of settler-colonial occupation, and whose history is marked by both Indigenous and Québecois national liberation struggles.
SftP Canada published a public statement condemning the militarization of campuses and the accompanying police violence against protesters, the defamation of student organizers by university administrators and politicians, and the violent attacks on students by Zionist vigilante groups.1 We also echoed the demands of these student organizers in calling for divestment, removing police presence from campuses and academic boycotts.
Focusing on counter-education and teach-ins. We organized and delivered a teach-in at the McGill encampment about science under occupation and the different ways academia and imperialism intersect as part of a summer education program run by Palestinian encampment organizers. In late June, when we heard that the zionist Weizmann Institute was attempting to revive its scientific research hasbara event series, we called for an immediate boycott and successfully managed to effectively cancel its first scheduled event since the pandemic. We hold steadfast to our position of not allowing science to be used to legitimize or empower occupying forces and insist that we must reimagine STEM for liberation.
The McGill encampment as well as an encampment targeting la Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec (CDPQ) in a public square downtown have both been violently dismantled here in Tiohtià:ke. Nevertheless, we recognise that our struggle is far from over. Our resolve to organize and fight for Palestinian liberation is stronger than ever. As scientists, as students and as organizers, it is our duty to continue empowering the Palestinian resistance as much as we can.
