Introduction

This book comprises a series of scholarly lectures that remember and honour the life and death of a photography student in Manchester, Tom Hurndall. The lectures have usually taken place in the institution where Tom studied, Manchester Metropolitan University, though the process of setting up and continuing the series has not always been easy. The lectures have been organised under the auspices of the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group. Many people have been involved in keeping the lecture series going over the years, and we acknowledge them here in a two-part introduction by two of the recent organisers. The first part is devoted to the history of the lecture series, drawing attention to the institutional and political issues that are raised by such a project; the second describes Tom’s life and death. We conclude the introduction with a list of the internationally-respected lecturers, providing the dates and titles of their contributions from 2005 to 2021.

I. The Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture

In 2005 an annual public lecture was established in Tom’s name at Manchester Metropolitan University to remember his decision to bear witness through his photographs, his determination to tell the truth of what he saw, and his bravery and selflessness in doing so.

The Annual Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture was initiated by a small group in Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) under the leadership of Jules Townshend in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy. Jules guided the lecture series; inviting speakers and arranging the first five lectures at MMU. The first lecture took place in November 2005, with Dr Salman Abu Sitta from the Palestine Land Society, and the second lecture was in November 2006 with Richard Kuper from Jews for Justice for Palestinians. The third lecture took place in the University of Manchester in January 2008 with Ilan Pappe from the University of Exeter. We were back in MMU for the fourth lecture, with Kamel Hawwash, Chair of the Britain-Palestine Twinning Network, the Birmingham-Ramallah Twinning initiative and the Midlands Palestinian Community Association. Avi Shlaim from the University of Oxford gave the fifth lecture in November 2009, and this lecture included a contribution from Tom’s mother, Jocelyn Hurndall.

When Jules Townshend retired, he passed the baton to Ian Parker, then based in the Department of Psychology at MMU, who organised the next four lectures with help from the team, and with continued support from Manchester Palestine Solidarity, represented by Linda Clair, who sold Palestinian goods at the event. Chris Roberts from the Institute for Population Health at the University of Manchester had worked with Jules on the first five lectures together with Paul Kelemen from the Department of Sociology, and continued on the organising team. The sixth lecture was in November 2010 with Karma Nabulsi from the University of Oxford, the seventh lecture was in October 2011 with Haneen Maikey, Director of alQaws Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, Jerusalem, the eighth lecture was in April 2013 with Eyal Weizman from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the ninth lecturer was in April 2014 with Daniel Machover of Hickman and Rose Solicitors in London.

Ian Parker left his post at MMU at the beginning of 2013, before the eighth lecture, and so much of the responsibility for the later lectures needed to be devolved to members of the group, now named the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group. The tenth lecture was organised by Anandi Ramamurthy, then at the University of Central Lancashire in the Department of Media; this was in March 2015, with Rania Masri from the American University of Beirut. The eleventh lecture was in March 2016, arranged once again by Ian Parker, with Adam Hanieh from SOAS, University of London.

By this time, new members of staff from within MMU had been mobilised to support the lecture series, with a decision to obtain financial support from different departments, and Annapurna Waughray from the Manchester Law School in MMU arranged the twelfth lecture in March 2017 with Penny Green from Queen Mary, University of London. Then Christian Klesse, who had been on the team for some years, working with Adi Kuntsman, both from the Sociology Department, arranged the thirteenth lecture in March 2018 with Miriyam Aouragh from the University of Westminster.

Meanwhile, Anandi Ramamurthy had been working with colleagues in the Department of Photography at MMU, Tom Hurndall’s home department when he was a student, to set up a permanent marker of Tom’s presence in the university. Over the course of several years a competition was arranged (with generous support for the prize and for installation from the Lipman-Miliband Trust). A design was chosen, and the long process of working with MMU to establish the piece of sculpture commemorating Tom’s life took up much time and energy. MMU management stipulated that the reference to Tom’s death in Gaza should be removed from the plaque next to the sculpture, and they then wanted the sculpture site moved from the central campus, the All Saints campus where Tom had studied and where most of the lectures had been given, to the new Brooks Building in the Birley Fields campus. These issues, to date, have not been resolved. We have continued, since 2018, to press MMU to install the sculpture. We arranged the fourteenth lecture in March 2019 with Salma Karmi-Ayyoub, a criminal barrister in London.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed additional challenges throughout 2020, though we were also very fortunate in gaining agreement from the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy to host the lecture. This was a step forward in gaining institutional recognition for the lecture and for acknowledging Tom Hurndall as a student at the university. We held the fifteenth lecture online, chaired by the Head of Department, Steve Hurst, in November 2020, with Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent as speaker, and the sixteenth lecture also took place online in 14 December 2021 with Lara Sheehi, secretary of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Society in the United States.

You can read these lectures, now gathered together in this book, not only as a series of reflections and interventions from different standpoints, but also as a record of an evolving analysis in solidarity with the Palestinian people that carry the traces of the years in which they were given.

We have organised these lectures over the years against opposition from fervent supporters of the Israeli State, and in the face of repeated attempts to have the lecture series excluded from MMU premises. The ethos of the series, and now this book, is that the process of building international solidarity with Palestinians takes many forms, and that scholarly debate is one important aspect of that solidarity. A commemoration and discussion inside the university is, both supporters and critics of the Israeli State well know, a way of legitimising the existence of the Palestinian people and the organisations that represent them. Speakers in the lecture series who are also involved in active solidarity with Palestinians, as Tom Hurndall was, have been clear that open debate is part of a wider struggle for justice. The problems we have faced are, however, nothing to the years of exploitation and oppression suffered by the Palestinians.

What should be clear from this brief account of the history of the lecture series is that the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group has been a rather ad hoc affair with changing personnel, and that the institutional circumstances have always been difficult. The memorial sculpture may yet enable Tom Hurndall’s life to be permanently marked in the collective historical memory of MMU, and the team is committed to keeping Tom’s memory alive in the annual lectures. If at all possible, this should be with active institutional support from MMU. This book is part of the process of making Tom Hurndall visible in MMU, in Manchester, and in supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people, a struggle for which Tom gave his life.