E.10. Sumud As Informal and Non-formal Educational Practice in Everyday Life in Palestine

Abstract

Across decades of settler colonial domination and apartheid, Palestinian communities have developed forms of everyday resistance that are deeply educational, and democratic. This panel explores sumud as a mode of embodied political agency, focusing particularly on, but not solely, women whose daily practices of care, labour, and community life become forms of resistance and citizenship under conditions of structural violence (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2020). Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, Palestine studies, occupational science, public sociology, and lifelong education, the panel investigates how meaningful occupations as purposeful activity, livelihood and participation in community life, become sites of learning, resistance, and democratic possibility (Hocking, 2009). The panel is an opportunity to explore the contested space of the hegemonic common sense of the oppressor vs. the good sense of the oppressed in Gramsci's sense of "every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship" (Gramsci, 1971).

We invite contributions that address the role of informal education in the resistance of Palestinians bearing the brunt of Israeli violence. Papers may explore embodied and affective labour; sustaining land-based knowledge through oral narratives; intergenerational identity; the politics of everyday care, and how informal educational practices shape collective resilience. By highlighting sumud as both a pedagogical and political process that is enacted by Palestinian women and men as a form of informal politics, the panel aims to frame democratic education beyond institutional settings by focusing on informal and non-formal spaces to show how communities, under settler colonialism and apartheid, generate learning, meaning making, and resistance.