Randa Abdel-Fattah : Discipline

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new novel Discipline is set in Sydney, Australia in 2021 during Ramadan. Discipline follows two Palestinians there, one in media and one in academia, where each has to confront questions of silence and complicity in their respective fields. As Israel intensifies its bombardment of Gaza, and as an eighteen-year-old student at a local Islamic school is arrested for protesting a university’s investment in an Israeli arms manufacturer—an arrest that results in an Islamophobic moral panic across Australia, our two Palestinian protagonists make very different decisions on how to engage with the power structures within their disciplines and within the country at large. What is the cost of staying and fighting within an organization that wants to silence you? What is the cost of walking way? In addition to being a riveting read on the level of story, Discipline is also a sort of primer on the weaponization of language, particularly liberal rhetoric employed to capture and domesticate radical movements of change. For the bonus audio archive Randa contributes a reading of excerpts from Chelsea Watego’s “Always Bet on Black (Power): The Fight Against Race.” This joins bonus readings from Dionne Brand, Danez Smith, Isabella Hammad, Natalie Diaz, Omar El Akkad, music from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and much more. To learn about how to

You can listen to Randa Abdel-Fattah : Discipline online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Randa Abdel-Fattah : Discipline is an episode from Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry by David Naimon, Milkweed Editions.

This episode is 1:56:31 long.

This episode was published on Dec 13, 2025.

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