This article examines academic space in Israel/Palestine as shaped by political separation, unequal power relations, and the exclusion of Palestinian knowledge, language, and presence. Drawing on the Shared Homeland Paradigm, it reimagines academic space through language and identity, knowledge production, political climate and militarization, and epistemic exile and mobility. It also offers a preliminary exploration of the “Academic Right of Return” as a way of thinking about a shared academic space in which Palestinians are recognized as active producers and shapers of knowledge.
Higher education is commonly regarded as a crucial pathway to social and economic mobility, while academic institutions are not neutral spaces - they reproduce existing political, social, and epistemic inequalities. Universities can reinforce colonial power structures by privileging Western forms of knowledge while marginalizing indigenous perspectives (Nuseibeh et al., 2024). Academic space, as used in this paper, refers to the institutional, epistemic, and the environment of higher education - the site that determines who may learn, who may teach, and whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate (Mbembe, 2016; Smith, 2012).
The globalization of Western knowledge has consolidated the notion that Western epistemologies represent the only legitimate knowledge forms, while knowledge originating from other traditions is perceived as "oriental" or "foreign" and thus inferior - an epistemic hierarchy that underpins colonial projects and asserts control over what counts as legitimate knowledge (Smith, 2012).
Consequently, indigenous communities are systematically excluded from academic centers of knowledge production, a dynamic particularly acute in settler-colonial contexts (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill, 2013). This exclusion operates not only through explicit policies but through the very organization of academic space itself - determining which languages, histories, and epistemologies are granted institutional visibility, and which are rendered structurally absent.