Technologies of Violence at Damascus Gate: Jerusalemite Children Write against "Combat Proven" Dispossession
In her lecture Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian will share with us the voices and writings of Jerusalemite children who live under Occupation. Through their letters she will reveal how surveying, imprisoning, torturing and killing can be used as a laboratory for states, arms companies, and security agencies to market their technologies as “combat proven”.
By exploring the politics of power in occupied Jerusalem neighbourhoods with her audience through reading children’s letters, she reveals their detection of such technologies of power and their daily suffering. Through the children’s own voices she will highlight the rights of Palestinian children to safety and security and how Israel's “security” industry uses their life and bodies to sell power/knowledge. She will discuss how Israel’s “combat proven” politics require heavy weaponisation and “professional” training of “security” people. The production of what she has called a security theology and the existing politics of fear maintain Palestinians in a militarised “show room”. The marking of children’s bodies and lives casts them as unchilded disposable others, whose bodies are used to transfer knowledge and to market technologies of violence.
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University of London.
Her research focuses on law, society and crimes of abuse of power. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered violence, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control, and children, settler colonialism, trauma and recovery in militarized and colonized zones.
