Sunday, November, 2026: JVP HAC Webinar
Repression and Resistance of Pro-Palestine Health Faculty and Professionals
With
Dr. Mary Bassett
Dr. Isaac Kamola
Dr. Amy Hagopian
Sunday, November 22, 11 am Pacific/2 pm Eastern
Register here or scan QR code in image below. This event will be recorded.
About the speakers
Dr. Mary Bassett is Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With more than three decades of experience in public health, Dr. Bassett’s career has focused on advancing health equity. Outside of her academic appointments, Dr. Bassett has pursued this mission through past posts including Health Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and as Program Director for the African Health Initiative and the Child Well-Being Program at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Her professional journey included spending some two decades living in Zimbabwe, training for her medical internship at Harlem Hospital Center, and serving as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Her position as Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, a position from which she was abruptly dismissed in December 2025, a move widely understood to be due to her willingness to support programming on Palestine.
Dr. Isaac Kamola is professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is author of Manufacturing Backlash, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, 2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019) and is currently the Strategic Director at the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP’s) Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. In that capacity, he has marshaled existing resources for pushing back and developed insights about academic freedom committees in professional associations as well as weaponized Title VI investigations and how they are pressuring disciplinary associations.
Dr. Amy Hagopian is professor emerita in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, where she directed an MPH training program. Her academic work has focused on how the maldistribution of power and wealth undermines health. She led a study estimating Iraq’s war-related mortality in 2011 and a CDC/Uganda Ministry of Health study to examine the spillover effects of PEPFAR on the nation’s health system. She’s worked in rural health and researched the migration of health workers from poor countries to rich ones. She served as chair of the editorial board of the American Journal of Public Health in 2024, received the American Public Health Association's Sidel-Levy award for Peace in 2018, and the International Health Section’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025. [In 2025 the American Public Health Association (APHA) revoked Dr. Hagopian’s membership and cancelled her registration for their annual meeting. She had been working for 15 years to have the association adopt a statement on the oppression of Palestine people by Israel’s illegal occupation.
Readings
There’s No Room for Palestine in “Viewpoint Diversity”
What to Do When Your Professional Association Breaks Your Heart