The 2017 Annual Lecture at the Centre for Studies of Home was given by Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. The lecture was given on Thursday, February 9, 2017 6:30-8.00pm in room 126, in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University.

Through the analyses of the various voices, narratives, and reports, the talk examines the inscription of state power over Palestinian children’s homes, bodies and lives; marking the connection between biopolitics, domopolitics and geopolitics. The analyses of the collected data in occupied East Jerusalem suggest that knowledge about child maltreatment and the violations of children’s rights, including their arrest and home arrest, cannot be dislocated from the history, politics, and structure of settler colonialism. The talk concludes by arguing that living a childhood situated in an invaded homespace and homeland, aims at engraving pain over children's bodies and lives, to maintain a necropolitical regime of dispossession. Such necropolitics is confronted by children's mundane power to speak back, and challenge their unending uprooting.

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. Nadera is a QMUL Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Studies of Home and the International State Crime Initiative. She is a long-time anti-violence, native Palestinian feminist activist and the director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. She has written extensively on domestic violence, the criminal justice response to violence against Palestinian women, child abuse, and women in Palestinian society. 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 trauma and recovery in militarized and colonized zones. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s most recent book is entitled: “Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear”, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.

The lecture is part of the QMUL CritiQues programme on 'Home for Refugee Children.'