To amplify the voices of students and academics in Gaza, Brief Encounters is collaborating with the English department at Al-Aqsa University to produce a special issue centred on the theme of Pedagogical Resilience, Challenges and Adaptive Strategies. 

Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina, Head of the English department and Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at Al-Aqsa University, joins the editorial board as guest senior editor alongside four CHASE researchers who complete the editorial team: George Clutterbuck, Millie Riddell, Chris Bates and Emily Gresham Beamer. 

The special issue affirms the right to education as it extends to our peers in Gaza, reinforces the guiding ambition of Brief Encounters to support the dissemination of knowledge to a global readership, and is intended to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the global academic community can respond in times of crisis.

On 12 April 2025, George Clutterbuck and Millie Riddell were kindly invited to convene with Dr Junina, and current and former members of Al-Aqsa University’s English faculty and student body, to formally announce the call for contributions. 

Since then, the CHASE-affiliated members of the editorial team have been welcomed to an ongoing series of workshops as part of RECONNECT – an initiative founded and led by Dr Junina. 

RECONNECT strives to restore access to education for students in the English department at Al-Aqsa University by providing guidance on study opportunities; hosting online seminars, workshops and knowledge-sharing events; and offering academic support and connections to the global academic community. 

Since Dr Junina launched the initiative in March 2025, RECONNECT has drawn the support of scholars from all over the world and generated workshops on a wide array of topics including research methods, visual art practices and poetry among others.

The workshops also support the creation of the special issue and provide the CHASE community with a unique opportunity to engage in peer-to-peer learning exchange with students and academics at Al-Aqsa University. 

On 19 June 2025, the editorial team of the special issue hosted a session at the CHASE Encounters Summer Conference, Plural Worlds, at which they formally announced the collaboration to the CHASE community and invited attendees to support its development. 

Dr Junina gave a presentation which focused on the experience of teaching under siege in Gaza and highlighted the significance of RECONNECT as a space for learning, resistance and global solidarity. 

It is hoped that contributions to the special issue will be published on a rolling basis from Autumn 2025. The special issue will include the work of current and former students and faculty associated with the English department at Al-Aqsa University, including voluntary lecturers and all who engage with the work of the department via RECONNECT. 

Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Head of the English Department at Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. He is an inaugural fellow of the Gaza Education Research Virtual Fellowship at the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE), University of Bristol. He earned his PhD in Applied Linguistics from Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand, where he received the 2019 ALANZ Best PhD Thesis Prize. His research focuses on language education in conflict zones, translanguaging, emotions in second language writing, academic literacies, and critical pedagogy. He has published and presented widely on virtual education under siege, highlighting the resilience of Palestinian students and educators. His current project, Knowlash and the Crisis of Learning, investigates the suppression of liberatory knowledge in the Palestinian context. His forthcoming article, ‘Displaced but not replaced’, will appear in Globalisation, Societies and Education. He recently presented at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and will speak at the RAISE Conference 2025 at the University of Glasgow.

George Clutterbuck is a part-time researcher at the University of Sussex. Her research is about feminist approaches to the study of marginalised women’s artistry and focuses upon aesthetics of disaffection in the work of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eva Frankfurther and Anna Mendelssohn. Formerly, George worked as an editorial assistant on the mental health subject list at Routledge, Taylor and Francis, and now works as a part-time training administrator for West Sussex Mind.

Chris Bates is part-time researcher in American Literature at the University of Sussex. His thesis, titled “Dendrocapitalism: Political Economies of Wood in American Literature 1765-1865,” explores what attention to wood—as a material form, commodity, energy source, or infrastructural ubiquity—reveals about the affective, aesthetic, and formal investments of the early American novel. Recipient of the Melville Society's Walter E. Bezanson Fellowship in 2024, his work has appeared in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and Textual Practice.

Emily Gresham Beamer is a researcher in the Goldsmiths Politics Department. Her doctoral project examines the emergence of drone-based mapping technologies in frontiers of forest governance, particularly in tropical forest spaces of the Global South. Her research extends these mappings past their operationality, engaging themes of data sovereignty and alterity to claim their endurance beyond the calculative encounter. She currently serves as an editorial assistant for the Open Library of Humanities journal (OLHJ), through a placement facilitated by the CHASE placement scheme. 

Millie Riddell is a doctoral researcher at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research examines conceptual art practices in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1970s and early 1980s and explores how the influence of global conceptual art and ideas intersected with local conditions, considering the legacy of centre/periphery models, decolonial approaches to land art and site-specificity, and the relationship between radical politics and radical art forms. 

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