In my becoming an academic – slowly and carefully through a part-time PhD at the IOE – I come across the term ‘subaltern’ a lot. I learned that Gayatri Spivak asked us in 1988 ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and Bhavani Kunjulakshmi along with Dr Laila Kadiwal qualify the question with whether we can hear it speak when it does. As an emergent researcher, I must consider my relationship with the subaltern when standing here in the super-altern. I must consider my role in both spheres because I embody both – Libyan father / German mother and citizen of sub and super-altern contexts.

I looked up ‘subaltern.’ I discovered that there is another meaning outside of the way Antonio Gramsci and then Spivak used the concept. In Aristotelian logic, it is part of the Square of Opposition – the subaltern is a particular proposition while the superaltern is a universal proposition (all humans are mortal). The two are tethered to one another but hierarchically – one implies the other. But what if they do not stand separate from each other? What if they collapse into one another?

You see, I inhabit yet another merged duality: educationalist/teacher and researcher. It is a duality calcified into separate hierarchical compounds in academia which I, like many, try to dissolve into one.  John Dewey (1916/2018) warned us against this separation of truth and knowledge (ends and means) by highlighting that fruitful education is research (inquiry), and inquiry is educative (transformative) for those engaging in it. Munir Fasheh, the Palestinian education philosopher and activist also reminded us that:

Rumi said 750 years ago, ‘you are what you search for.’ What one searches for in life is what characterizes that person most: it is one’s identity. For us as Arabs to follow ‘research’ and ignore ‘search’ is pitiful; it is a reflection of colonized minds. […] The word we use in Arabic for research is bahth which is a synonym of search, not research. Search is connected to life; research to institutions (Sukarieh, 2019, p. 189).

My PhD project is an example of how institutional ‘research’ changed into a ‘search’ for me as it started off in the field of International Development and Peacebuilding Education – a perceived necessity because Libya is a ‘conflict-affected’ context, but my bahth for a ‘better’ reality for Libyans changed that. Now, my PhD inquiry is a disentanglement from an often-neo-colonial International Development lens (outside looking in) into a more explorative and philosophical search for an education that can liberate Libyans.  Indeed, Mai Abu Moghli and Nida Badawi invite scholars in global northern academia to ask, “how does our research and academic contribution feed into the struggle for liberation, and not exceptionalize Palestine in that sense.” In other words, they asked us to do more than witness, they want us to become agents of change in our fields.

I insist there is a way to do my work with Libyan teachers at this British university with integrity and agency, and it is Gaza which teaches me how to do this. It is Palestine that echoes forgotten lessons on the social purpose of (higher) education and the personal purpose of being a (re)searcher.

Aziz Choudry  spoke about how academics can also be activists, either through their research or through their practice at Higher Education Institutions. He highlighted the spaces within these structures where anti-colonial shifts can begin:

Universities tend to be inherently conservative kinds of institutions. […] But, you know, there is at the same time, I think, pockets of resistance or people within universities. […]

This is how I found myself active in such an anti-colonial space – the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions group at UCL. While I reposition myself as an insider-looking-in at Libya in my PhD project, there is more I can do here on the outside. With this moral imperative as tailwind, and as a member of the Solidarity Against Scholasticide committee of the BDS group, I joined a project, funded by UCL’s Collaborative Social Sciences Research Domains. It aims to facilitate the work of Gazan scholars – Dr Abdrabou Al-Anzi (Al-Azhar University), Dr Nihad Al-Sheikh Khalil (Islamic University) and Dr Ahmed Junina (Al-Aqsa University) – in developing their research on what Reconstruction of Home means to them during genocide. Rachel Rosen’s (PI) and my (ECR) contribution to this project will be a trial of anti-colonial practice here in the super-altern. This way, we hope to reciprocate our colleagues’ intellectual labour; we too must think about reconstructing our institutional home and ask what it is really for.

FreshEd episodes like these walk beside me and encourage me as I weave the many strands of my academic becoming: one strand is my PhD thesis on how Libyan teachers conceptualise educational aims; another is how I conduct myself ethically here while I read, think and write in this university – how I engage with the aims of higher education in times quaking with direct, cultural and structural violence.

June 1, 2026