Nadera Shalhoub‐kevorkian
Biographic Data
| ID | 223304 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nadera Shalhoub‐kevorkian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nadera |
| FAMILY NAME | Shalhoub‐kevorkian |
| SIGNATURE | KEVORKIAN N S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2807-0540 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 348 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
From the Grave Upward: Southernist Political Theology, the Dead, and Gaza
How does the Palestinian experience help conceptualize an umbrella understanding of genocides against indigenous peoples, the racialized others, spanning from Africa, Asia, to the Americas, and back to Palestine? Our Southernist political theology decenters sovereignty, beginning instead with those whose lives have been ontologically marginalized—those who are exposed to death, maiming, and dispossession not as exceptions but as constitutive of t…
Enacting Lived Sovereignty Amid Epistemic and Ontological Violence in the Settler‐Colonial Academy
This paper examines the tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and the structural and institutional logics of the settler‐colonial academy. Critical scholarship suggests that higher education can regulate epistemic boundaries, discipline knowledge production, and shape the subjectivities of colonized students. In this context, the paper explores how colonized students enact individual and collective forms of sovereignty. Drawing on Fanon's refle…
The Politics of Acquiring the Colonizer’s Language in the Colonial Academy
Way too white’: Navigating our colonial legacies through critical discussions on positionality and power dynamics with Palestinian feminist scholars
Particularly in recent years, interest in decolonizing knowledge production is increasing considerably. Debates have raised within various academic disciplines on the role of the researcher's positionality in the research and knowledge production process. Reflexivity and positionality have become keywords within feminist and anti-oppressive research, forcing scholars to confront a critical analysis of how knowledge is shaped and influenced by the…
More rifles than laptops”: Palestinian students’ experiences of social work education in times of genocide
Social work education and practice are deeply entangled with structures of oppression that maintain racism and settler colonialism. This article invokes a critical feminist, context-informed methodology focusing on Palestinian Jerusalemite social work students’ experiences at one of Israel’s institutions of higher education amid the genocide against Gazans. The findings point to the racialization of social work education, operating in a specific …
Oppression, resistance, and radical love: Lessons from Palestinian feminists as a path to healing
This paper examines the pivotal role of Palestinian feminist activism in resisting settler-colonial violence and ongoing genocidal practices in Palestine. Utilizing decolonial theoretical frameworks and qualitative data from interviews with Palestinian feminists, the study explores how feminist praxis serves as a mechanism for both individual and collective survival, as well as psychological healing. This analysis critically engages with the shor…
Five Pillars of Zionist Genocidal Apparatus: A Palestinian Problematization of Genocide Studies
In this paper, I trouble the ways Genocide Studies has engaged with the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the political power embedded in invoking genocide. To begin, I must state that what guides
An Abolitionist Liveability Against State Carceral Unchilding Ahmad Manasra’s life-making
This article will not look at the incarceration of Ahmad Manasra through the prism of state violence against him, but more specifically through his radical call for “life-making”—as an abolitionist liveability against state criminality. We join Ahmad in taking a critical stance towards the politics of life—and what Aysha Odeh and Robin Kelley refer to as “freedom dreams”—refuting the state’s carceral network and the acceptance of the settler colo…
Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime
Racializing human rights: Political orientation, racial beliefs, and media use as predictors of support for human rights violations – a case study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
To what extent do political orientation, racial beliefs, and media use contribute to explaining support for human rights violations? To address these question, we draw on Adorno's “authoritarian personality” theory by proposing the concept of “racial syndrome,” resulting in affinity for expressions of support for right-wing ideologies. Using a public opinion survey conducted among Jewish-Israeli adults (N = 1,001), we show that political orientat…
Persistent faces: Palestinian fatherhood against necropower
Critical consciousness from a Palestinian feminist, decolonial perspective: A collective exploratory inquiry
To date, many studies have documented the devastating impact of the Israeli military occupation in Palestine, which deprives Palestinians of all basic and human rights. Yet, the interlocking oppressions that characterize the Israeli occupation—as those of other colonial systems—are mostly overlooked, with little attention being devoted in mainstream literature to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the colonial project.…
Feminist Except for Palestine: Where Are Feminist Social Workers on Palestine
Despite international social work commitments to social justice, human dignity, and individual worth, feminist social work remains silent on Palestine. Israeli settler colonial violence pushes us to revisit our responsibilities to stand against colonized militarism. We insist that collective liberation is a feminist ethical constant, a political bosom for decolonization, a compass for critical feminist social work. In this article, we extend prev…
Feminism and Geopolitics: A Collaborative Project on the Cunning of Gender Violence
We share perspectives from involvement in an international collaborative project culminating in a book titled The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism, (Duke University Press, 2023). Raising questions about the recent feminist "success" in putting gender-based violence and violence against women on the global agenda, as ethnographers, socio-legal scholars, journalists, and activists who focus on the everyday lives of people and th…
Iron Caging the Palestinian Home: Child Home Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem as Lawfare
Children Speaking against Home Arrest: Decolonising Racial Penologies
Home arrest (HA), an alternative rehabilitative sentence to the more punitive disposal of imprisonment, is utilised in a range of ways by criminal justice regimes across the world. However, its implementation contains the potential for intimate political intrusion. This paper engages with forty-one testimonials gathered from Palestinian children, young people (aged 12–18 years) and their families, examining their experiences under HA in Occupied …
Secret Penetrabilities: Embodied Coloniality, Gendered Violence, and the Racialized Policing of Affects
Secrecy as a mode of governance offers a new site to analyze and understand the state’s violence against those living under settler colonial oppression. In this article, we investigate the Israeli state’s policies and use of “secret information” to violate, infiltrate, and penetrate Palestinian women’s lives, bodies, psyches, and minds in Occupied East Jerusalem. By sharing Palestinian women’s narratives, we offer a glimpse into the operation of …
Gun to body: Mental health against unchilding
The paper demarcates the ways children experience and locate their suffering within the colonial violence that dominates their reality. It follows Martín‐Baró's model of articulating a critical psychology “of the people,” (Lykes & Sibley, 2014) while connecting and constructing the author's analysis through the words and reflections of Palestinian children from Jerusalem, Hebron and Gaza. To understand Palestinian children's narrations, the artic…
Necropenology: Conquering new bodies, psychics, and territories of death in East Jerusalem
In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the state – through its courts, law, military, and police – leaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusal…
Engaged Academia in a Conflict Zone? Palestinian and Jewish Students in Israel
Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding
Who has the right to a safe and protected childhood? Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding deepens understanding of children as political capital in the hands of those in power, critically engaging children's voices alongside archival, historical, and ethnographic material in Palestine. Offering the concept of unchilding', Shalhoub-Kevorkian exposes the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and …
Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem
This article discusses the role of the Israeli politico-legal system in framing and constructing the racialization of children and childhood. Drawing on accounts of colonial violence inflicted upon incarcerated children’s bodies and lives, and based on Sherene Razack’s critical analyses on the “pervasiveness of indifference,” we demonstrate how the criminal justice system is fundamental to the Israeli state’s targeting of Palestinian children and…
Child Arrest, Settler Colonialism, and the Israeli Juvenile System: A Case Study of Occupied East Jerusalem
Based on three interrelated theoretical frameworks—institutional racism, settler colonialism and security reasoning—the study examines child arrests in Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ), addressing how the Israeli justice and law enforcement systems treat Palestinian children. Through analyses of Knesset protocols, court watch participatory observations, review of court proceedings and verdicts, interviews with children, families and professionals in…
Gendered Suffering and the Eviction of the Native
The treatment of pregnant women in Palestine offers an important perspective on the interlocking power of gender and race in the context of settler colonialism. However, the gendered violence experienced by pregnant women remains mostly invisible. This chapter shares the voices of pregnant Palestinians to explore how they experience specific forms of gendered violence in a militarized and occupied homeland. It explains the steps taken by Israel t…
Settler Colonialism, Surveillance, and Fear
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Femicide and the Palestinian Criminal Justice System: Seeds of Change in the Context of State Building
Despite the criminalization of abuses inflicted upon women, laws are still considered major sources of women's oppression. This article discusses how Palestinian society and its criminal justice system, during a politically formative period of state building, relates to "femicide." Femicide in this study pertains to the murder of girls or women for allegedly committing "crimes of family honor." Official statistics, Cassation Court rulings, and si…
Liberating voices: The political implications of palestinian mothers narrating their loss
Counter-Spaces as Resistance in Conflict Zones: Palestinian Women Recreating a Home
Women's voices, roles, and contributions are die most misunderstood issues in the analysis of war zones and conflict areas. This paper brings the feminist lens into the analysis of Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It examines the effect and legacy of policies inflicted by the doctrines of "no safe haven" and of "security reasoning" in relation to women, explores the way it shapes women's interactions with their family mem…
The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror
Colonial and settler colonial dispossession is performed through various forms of violence, justified by cultural, historical, religious and national imperatives. In this paper, I define one of these forms of violence as the occupation of the senses, referring to the sensory technologies that manage bodies, language, sight, time and space in the colony. This paper analyses the parades, marches and festivals performed in the Palestinian city space…
Law, Politics, and Violence Against Women: A Case Study of Palestinians in Israel
Major controversies regarding the value of legal and policy reforms have accompanied research on wife battering and social reactions to it. The present study examines the utility of law enforcement and emphasizes the relationship between gender, culture, and politics. It points to the difficulties arising from the shift from private, traditional methods of dealing with violence against women to a more public approach characterized by intervention…
Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing "Scientific" Borders
Towards a cultural definition of rape
The Politics of Birth and the Intimacies of Violence Against Palestinian Women in Occupied East Jerusalem: Table 1
Focusing on the embodiment of violence against pregnant women, this paper borrows from Palestinian women’s own words and descriptions to reveal intimate aspects of aggression against and surveillance over their bodies and lives. The paper examines both the effects of violence on young mothers and their community and the denial of violence by the settler colonial state. I emphasize the structural regime that exacerbates such aggression, as well as…
The Political Economy of Children's Trauma: A Case Study of House Demolition in Palestine
Disclosure of Child Abuse in Conflict Areas
Analyzing legal policies requires an in-depth understanding of the sociopolitical contexts within which sexual abuse is disclosed. Data presented in this study are based on a larger study of 628 Palestinian Israeli girls aged 14 to 16 years. Of these 628 girls, 28 victims of sexual abuse discussed their abuse with the research team. In addition, interviews were conducted with professional helpers. The contextual analyses of the interviews focused…
Imposition of virginity testing: A Life-Saver or a License to Kill
Blocking Her Exclusion: A Contextually Sensitive Model of Intervention for Handling Female Abuse
This article presents an alternative model of intervention to deal with cases of female sexual abuse. The model is predicated on the principle that Western models of intervention, if applied in collective, non‐Western societies, could lead to the exclusion of the victim from normal social participation. It offers features designed to ensure the safety and welfare of the victim and to preclude her exclusion from future normal social participation.…
Tolerating Battering: Invisible Methods of Social Control
This article examines how invisible methods of social control contribute to the tolerance of battering amongst women. The study is based on the responses of 173 Palestinian women selected randomly from the East Jerusalem area, and who were interviewed to assess their perception and response to wife battering. Quantitative and qualitative data collected on the respondents suggest that while women do not accept violence practised on them, they tole…
Criminality in Spaces of Death: The Palestinian Case Study
This study examines how Palestinian dead bodies and spaces of death in occupied East Jerusalem are ‘hot spots ’ of criminality. The arguments raised challenge traditional hot-spot theories of crime that build their definition of criminality around official state statistics and information and visible spaces of crime. The paper offers a bottom-up analysis of crimes against the dead and their families in East Jerusalem, examining the manner in whic…
Voice Therapy for Women Aligned with Political Prisoners: A Case Study of Trauma among Palestinian Women in the Second Intifada
The action‐oriented model of group intervention aims at releasing the silenced voices of women, helping them journey from objectification to full human subjectivity. Applied in conflict‐ridden Palestine, voice therapy can reduce the psychological toll that comes from living in a politically conflicted zone. Women often bear that psychological burden more than men because of the violent political situation and patriarchal demands. Conducted with P…
The Efficacy of Israeli Law in Preventing Violence Within Palestinian Families Living in Israel
Changes in public attitudes to violence have given rise to debates about the proper relationship between gender, violence and the role of the State. This study of Palestinians living in Israel examines the appropriateness of formal legal interventions in spousal assault cases for a community with different cultural values, including a mistrust of state intervention and the legal order. Structured interviews with welfare professionals in 55 cases …
The Grammar of Rights in Colonial Contexts: The Case of Palestinian Women in Israel
This article examines the limitations of human rights activism in a colonial context by invoking the voices, experiences, and insights of Bedouin women living in Israel. Through extensive interviews, Bedouin women living in unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev reveal their struggles as unrecognized and “invisible” members of society. The article explores the ways in which the prevailing “grammar of rights”—the formal and informal mechanisms c…
Racism, militarisation and policing: Police reactions to violence against Palestinian women in Israel
This article moves beyond the discussion of police racism to a broader account of the militaristic racism of policing in Israel. The highly permeable boundaries between the military, society and the political conflict all affect how violence against women is policed. Focusing on case studies of police officers' perceptions of abused Palestinian Israeli women — members of an ethnic and indigenous minority — this paper considers key features of the…
Integrating a Victim Voice in Community Policing: A Feminist Critique
The article addresses the role of victim's voice in community policing of violence against women. Using Israel as a case study, with its minority Arab and majority Jewish communities, we show the paradoxes of adhering to community policing tenets in a highly collectivist community, and when divergence and conflict rather than congruence and consensus characterize the relations between the police, the minority community and its victims. The articl…
Feminist Except for Palestine: Where Are Feminist Social Workers on Palestine
Despite international social work commitments to social justice, human dignity, and individual worth, feminist social work remains silent on Palestine. Israeli settler colonial violence pushes us to revisit our responsibilities to stand against colonized militarism. We insist that collective liberation is a feminist ethical constant, a political bosom for decolonization, a compass for critical feminist social work. In this article, we extend prev…
Negotiating the Present, Historicizing the Future: Palestinian Children Speak About the Israeli Separation Wall
Children living in conflict zones witness violence, loss of loved ones, killing, injury, and displacement, experiencing fear and loss of protection in their communities-experiences likely to affect the children for the remainder of their lives. This article examines one aspect of the violent conflict in the Palestinian Occupied Territories-West Bank, the way Palestinian children perceive and react to the effect of Israeli military occupation as r…
Using the Dialogue Tent to Break Mental Chains: Listening and Being Heard
Women are silenced by gender-biased practices that reward their obedience and punish them for speaking out. This is especially true of Palestinian women who live under socio-political oppression and are faced with a social reality that is sexist, patriarchal, and discriminatory. The dialogue tent introduced here offered a safe space for Palestinian women to break silence, critically consider their own experiences, and conceptualize and voice thei…
Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem
This article discusses the role of the Israeli politico-legal system in framing and constructing the racialization of children and childhood. Drawing on accounts of colonial violence inflicted upon incarcerated children’s bodies and lives, and based on Sherene Razack’s critical analyses on the “pervasiveness of indifference,” we demonstrate how the criminal justice system is fundamental to the Israeli state’s targeting of Palestinian children and…
Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the Naqab/Negev
This contribution focuses on the experiences and voices of Palestinian Bedouin women surviving and challenging Israeli colonial policies while residing in their own land and, in particular, the Bedouin women of the Naqab living in unrecognized villages. Through interviews and focus groups, this study learns from and engages with the voices of Palestinian Bedouin women because colonized women's criticisms of the political economic apparatus are se…
E-Resistance and Technological In/Security in Everyday Life: The Palestinian Case
This paper analyses the roles played by Information Computer Technologies (ICT) and the internet in areas of conflict, with a specific focus on the Palestinian context in Jerusalem. In particular, it examines the way the politics of everydayness in Jerusalem constructs Palestinians as security threats and, in turn, subjects them to technologized surveillance and spatial control. Examining the effect of the politics of everydayness when juxtaposed…
Tolerating Battering: Invisible Methods of Social Control
This article examines how invisible methods of social control contribute to the tolerance of battering amongst women. The study is based on the responses of 173 Palestinian women selected randomly from the East Jerusalem area, and who were interviewed to assess their perception and response to wife battering. Quantitative and qualitative data collected on the respondents suggest that while women do not accept violence practised on them, they tole…
Towards a cultural definition of rape
Law, Politics, and Violence Against Women: A Case Study of Palestinians in Israel
Major controversies regarding the value of legal and policy reforms have accompanied research on wife battering and social reactions to it. The present study examines the utility of law enforcement and emphasizes the relationship between gender, culture, and politics. It points to the difficulties arising from the shift from private, traditional methods of dealing with violence against women to a more public approach characterized by intervention…
The Efficacy of Israeli Law in Preventing Violence Within Palestinian Families Living in Israel
Changes in public attitudes to violence have given rise to debates about the proper relationship between gender, violence and the role of the State. This study of Palestinians living in Israel examines the appropriateness of formal legal interventions in spousal assault cases for a community with different cultural values, including a mistrust of state intervention and the legal order. Structured interviews with welfare professionals in 55 cases …
Blocking Her Exclusion: A Contextually Sensitive Model of Intervention for Handling Female Abuse
This article presents an alternative model of intervention to deal with cases of female sexual abuse. The model is predicated on the principle that Western models of intervention, if applied in collective, non‐Western societies, could lead to the exclusion of the victim from normal social participation. It offers features designed to ensure the safety and welfare of the victim and to preclude her exclusion from future normal social participation.…
Women and War in Lebanon
Using the Dialogue Tent to Break Mental Chains: Listening and Being Heard
Women are silenced by gender-biased practices that reward their obedience and punish them for speaking out. This is especially true of Palestinian women who live under socio-political oppression and are faced with a social reality that is sexist, patriarchal, and discriminatory. The dialogue tent introduced here offered a safe space for Palestinian women to break silence, critically consider their own experiences, and conceptualize and voice thei…
Integrating a Victim Voice in Community Policing: A Feminist Critique
The article addresses the role of victim's voice in community policing of violence against women. Using Israel as a case study, with its minority Arab and majority Jewish communities, we show the paradoxes of adhering to community policing tenets in a highly collectivist community, and when divergence and conflict rather than congruence and consensus characterize the relations between the police, the minority community and its victims. The articl…
Femicide and the Palestinian Criminal Justice System: Seeds of Change in the Context of State Building
Despite the criminalization of abuses inflicted upon women, laws are still considered major sources of women's oppression. This article discusses how Palestinian society and its criminal justice system, during a politically formative period of state building, relates to "femicide." Femicide in this study pertains to the murder of girls or women for allegedly committing "crimes of family honor." Official statistics, Cassation Court rulings, and si…
Liberating voices: The political implications of palestinian mothers narrating their loss
Liberating voices: The political implications of palestinian mothers narrating their loss
Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing "Scientific" Borders
Racism, militarisation and policing: Police reactions to violence against Palestinian women in Israel
This article moves beyond the discussion of police racism to a broader account of the militaristic racism of policing in Israel. The highly permeable boundaries between the military, society and the political conflict all affect how violence against women is policed. Focusing on case studies of police officers' perceptions of abused Palestinian Israeli women — members of an ethnic and indigenous minority — this paper considers key features of the…
Disclosure of Child Abuse in Conflict Areas
Analyzing legal policies requires an in-depth understanding of the sociopolitical contexts within which sexual abuse is disclosed. Data presented in this study are based on a larger study of 628 Palestinian Israeli girls aged 14 to 16 years. Of these 628 girls, 28 victims of sexual abuse discussed their abuse with the research team. In addition, interviews were conducted with professional helpers. The contextual analyses of the interviews focused…
Counter-Spaces as Resistance in Conflict Zones: Palestinian Women Recreating a Home
Women's voices, roles, and contributions are die most misunderstood issues in the analysis of war zones and conflict areas. This paper brings the feminist lens into the analysis of Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It examines the effect and legacy of policies inflicted by the doctrines of "no safe haven" and of "security reasoning" in relation to women, explores the way it shapes women's interactions with their family mem…
Voice Therapy for Women Aligned with Political Prisoners: A Case Study of Trauma among Palestinian Women in the Second Intifada
The action‐oriented model of group intervention aims at releasing the silenced voices of women, helping them journey from objectification to full human subjectivity. Applied in conflict‐ridden Palestine, voice therapy can reduce the psychological toll that comes from living in a politically conflicted zone. Women often bear that psychological burden more than men because of the violent political situation and patriarchal demands. Conducted with P…
Imposition of virginity testing: A Life-Saver or a License to Kill
Negotiating the Present, Historicizing the Future: Palestinian Children Speak About the Israeli Separation Wall
Children living in conflict zones witness violence, loss of loved ones, killing, injury, and displacement, experiencing fear and loss of protection in their communities-experiences likely to affect the children for the remainder of their lives. This article examines one aspect of the violent conflict in the Palestinian Occupied Territories-West Bank, the way Palestinian children perceive and react to the effect of Israeli military occupation as r…
The gendered nature of education under siege: A Palestinian feminist perspective
Military occupation affects educational space and places, transforming them into politicized, sexed, gendered, and racialized ones. The uncontrolled political violence in conflict zones causes psychological trauma, internal displacement and economic stagnation, and intersect to shape the gendered nature of education. This article is based on data collected from young Palestinian women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 2004–2007. Its…
Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study
This book examines and discusses the ordeals that women face as violence is perpetrated against them in politically conflicted and militarized areas. In conflict zones, every act is affected by, dependent on and mobilised by militaristic values. The militarization of both the private and public space and the use of the gendered bodies increases the vulnerability of both men and women, and further masculinises the patriarchal hegemonic powers. Thr…
The Political Economy of Children's Trauma: A Case Study of House Demolition in Palestine
Palestinian women's voices challenging human rights activism
Victimology Between the Local and the Global
This special issue is about victimization as a very personal experience that is profoundly susceptible to communal forgetting. It includes an important quantitative contribution in the conventional routine activities theory tradition. At the same time, it challenges conventional victimological examinations, while raising critical race, class and gendered issues. The essays herein help us to see more abstract architectures of routine activity that…
Panoptical Web: Internet and Victimization of Women
In this paper we attempt to examine the role of electronic space and its intersection with young women's lives. The article investigates the internet use/abuse of women as embedded in the power structure and the ways it reshapes gender relations and re-constructs women's victimization. In an attempt to expand our understanding of the victimological and criminological implications of the internet for females our case study focuses particularly on …
E-Resistance among Palestinian Women: Coping in Conflict-Ridden Areas
The proliferation of digital technologies and cyberspace affects the workings of power, challenging the boundaries of space, place, and time. The development of technological infrastructure that operates on both a day-to-day basis and a global scale can enhance women’s chances to resist oppression, but it can also increase crimes against and abuse of women. This article examines the effects of digital technologies on women living in conflict zone…
Political science (62 works) · Sociology (58 works) · Law (56 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (51 works) · Politics (48 works) · Criminology (39 works) · Gender Studies (33 works) · Law (30 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (28 works) · Psychology (28 works)