tl;dr AGREE WITH ME

You know how, sometimes, the writing Just Comes Together? I had a pleasant moment of that recently. I had a hacked-together draft of my conference paper for APSA: I'd ironed out the parts that had been labelled "to be written" in my original chapter-draft, I'd cut everything I could possibly cut, I'd edited for clarity, I'd cleaned up my citations. The one thing I didn't have was a conclusion; the chapter I'd taken it from had a conclusion based in the theoretical argument I was making (which I'd cut from this paper), and I really didn't have any good ideas for where to go with this. In the space where the conclusion should have been, I had the following text:

...

In conclusion, I'm right? The end?

Trust me, I nearly considered circulating it like that. Hey, it's August; I'm not at my best.

However, I forced myself to sit down, armed with a large iced coffee, and write a real conclusion. Without any real advance planning, this is what came out--and I rather like it.

In writing this paper, I have hoped to describe the way these two groups, Adalah-NY and Al-Awda, engage in political life very differently: their preferred rhetoric, their alliances with other groups, and their relationships to the identities of their members and allies all vary highly, and in ways that make sense given the different segments of Arab’s New York and progressive/radical communities that house them. If, at the very least, I have contributed to an effort to disaggregate the understanding of what Palestine activism is in the contemporary United States, I consider that I have produced useful intellectual work.

At the same time, I’d like to suggest some of the larger ramifications of this work for thinking about social movements. Too often, radical movements with low probability of achieving their goals are viewed only as foils for more moderate movements, the ones who are likely to win concessions, in part because of tensions between radical movements and the nervous centers of power. I want to suggest that there are important reasons for not treating groups like Al-Awda and Adalah-NY as afterthoughts. Empirically, the way that the margins battle over the meaning of their work ends up moving down into more centrist groups: the way the language of boycott, even if substantially divorced from the original context of the BDS call, has moved into mainstream Palestine activism, is a sure sign of this. If we want to see where mainstream movements are going, we must look to their margins. Normatively—and I believe we are as required to normatively justify our work as we are to methodologically justify it—we cannot ignore voices on the margins, because they represent political actors making arguments that demand a full hearing. Without being able to hear the argument within any set of claims made, and being able to address the fundamental question of justice that beats at the heart of it, political society will be unable to aim for full incorporation of all members.

I mean, it says the exact same thing--just more belligerently, really.

In other news, if you're interested in what I have to say about Palestine activism in New York, this paper is publicly available for free. It's called "From the (East) River to the Sea: Palestine Activism in Arab New York," and is available for online viewing via the Social Science Research Network here. Now I just have to come up with a way to present 50 pages of evidence in 20 minutes...