Ashlaa’ as an analytic illuminates the textures of Palestinian life and death, and perhaps more accurately life in death. Parallel to the material work of excavating the pieces of our Palestinian flesh from beneath the rubble, the talk will engage with new epistemological spaces excavated by Gazans when and while creating life, knowledge, and new humanity. Thinking through ashlaa is thinking against the carceral logic of the colonizer, and making a break in the colonizer’s system. It is thinking of the wholeness of Palestine against Tashlea’ (cutting the body to pieces) and acting actively to rupture the genocidal logic.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian- a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonialstate’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London, Professor Extraordinarius- University of South Africa, Visiting Professor- Princeton University, and Professor emeritus- the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Cambridge University Press 2019); co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.