Humanities advocates focus on demonstrating the humanities’ value to encourage participation. This advocacy is largely done through institutional means, and rarely taken directly to the public. This article argues that by reframing the theory of Direct Action, humanities advocates can effectively engage the public. The article begins by exploring three different understandings of the humanities: that they develop good citizenship, that they develop understanding, and that they develop critical thought. The article then discusses what Direct Action is and how it works. The article concludes by describing how to reframe Direct Action to suit the needs of the humanities, including potential actions that will achieve those ends. Humanities Direct Action must be seen as a debate and will focus on increasing critical thinking.

I argue that while recognition is important for Middle Eastern and North African philosophers in academia and society, recognition alone should not define the anti-colonial movement. BDS provides a better model of engagement because it constructs identities in order to bring about material changes in the academy and beyond. In the first part of the essay, I catalog how MENA thought traditions have been and continue to be suppressed within the academy and philosophy in particular. I then sketch one possible path to better representation in philosophy by reading Fayez Sayegh’s analyses of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian non-being. In the second half of the essay, I argue that BDS is among the premier anti-colonial movements on American campuses today because it is a materialist anti-racist movement. Insofar as that movement is often shunned and prohibited, an anti-colonial society offers a membership in exile.

In this article, I explore the contrast between the recent George Floyd protests and the lockdowns immediately prior by situating these rebellions in the context of Foucault’s disciplinary society and subsequent scholarship on biopolitical management. I assert that the disciplinary mechanisms operative in finance/debt, policing and epidemiological management of the virus share similar epistemological assumptions stemming from liberal individualism. The revolutionary character of these uprisings therefore stems from their epistemological subversions of the predictable individual, and this figure’s spatiotemporal situatedness, a construction that helps power make claims on our collective future. The protests push us to see beyond a strict Foucauldian reading of this moment to uncover the metastatic status of identities in rebellion, which sustain resistance to disciplinary society’s epistemological foundations.