Conference Program

People in Gaza have long faced systemic colonial violence through blockade, occupation, and the deliberate restriction of movement and resources. Since October 2023, this violence has escalated into an active genocide (Albanese, 2024), which has also targeted the educational infrastructure that has long sustained learners, through a deliberate campaign of scholasticide (Dader et al., 2024; Alarabeed, 2025; Desai et al., 2025). This study examines resistance to this scholasticide by centering Gazan women as knowledge-makers and knowledge-seekers who continue to sustain education amid the deliberate destruction of schools and universities. By documenting their testimonies and analyzing their embodied experiences, this study presents Gazan women as active intellectual and practical laborers, refusing the "women-and-children" rhetoric that reduces them to passive victims or martyrs and recognizing them as forces that sustain education when everything around them is deliberately destroyed.

Besides facing systemic colonial violence, Gazan women must also contend with patriarchal norms that constrain their ambitions and freedom of movement. These norms dismiss their educational role, reducing them to "stay-at-home mothers" and erasing their crucial contributions to building communities of care. The study reveals how the genocide has further intensified these patriarchal harms: forced marriage, for instance, has been increasingly normalized as economic necessity. Drawing on decolonial and feminist critical frameworks (Smith, 2021), this study examines the construction of informal learning spaces as a form of knowledge production with implications for how indigenous and marginalized women globally resist systemic erasure.

The study unfolds in two phases. The first gathers oral testimonies from Gazan women educators and students through narrative interviews, exploring their relationship to education before and during the genocide. The second, developed collaboratively with participants, uses photo-based inquiry to build a multimedia archive of stories told through images they themselves captured. Across both phases, participants are invited to reimagine the rebuilding of educational spaces through the lens of "critical hope" (Freire, 1992). The study relies on snowball sampling via existing community networks, prioritizing trust, safety, and voluntary participation in a highly sensitive context.

Through the experiences of a small group of women in Gaza, preliminary findings illuminate how education persists as an act of resistance under genocide. Example narratives include how women came to together to create alternative classrooms using improvised materials such as whiteboards made from tarps and nylon. Students continued their studies despite targeted airstrikes on internet hubs they frequented and the manual survival labor that they had to go through.

Across these testimonies, participants insisted that their efforts in maintaining education are a temporary rescue, not a substitute for real schooling, refusing to let their resilience obscure the ongoing catastrophe affecting vulnerable learners in Gaza. This study bears witness to Gazan women's crucial role in sustaining education, documenting their unrecognized struggles, and most importantly, what they are fighting to keep alive across communities.