Conference Program

Aida Camp is one of more than sixty Palestinian refugee camps established in the aftermath of the Nakba and today offers a particularly significant site for examining contemporary forms of educational resistance under conditions of colonial occupation and systemic oppression. Founded in 1949 and formally recognised in 1950, the camp covers less than one square kilometre. Extreme population density, overcrowded housing, severe restrictions on mobility, and constant exposure to military violence shape everyday life. The apartheid wall further defines both the camp’s geography and its symbolic condition: it physically encloses the area and structures daily existence through separation, surveillance, and territorial fragmentation (Ghannam & Haar, 2018).

In this context, education is not simply a matter of access to schooling; it becomes a social practice through which collective survival, memory transmission, and political subject formation are sustained. Critical pedagogy helps frame education as a terrain of conflict and emancipatory possibility, where critical consciousness and transformative agency can develop even under structural oppression (Freire, 2022). At the same time, educational practices create spaces for recognition, voice, and resistant subjectivity within systems of exclusion (hooks, 2020). In the Palestinian context, youth and community centres therefore emerge not only as places of extracurricular support, but as pedagogical infrastructures that sustain collective agency, political imagination, and forms of democratic learning under occupation.

This paper draws on qualitative field interviews with three organisations engaged in social and educational work inside the camp: Amal al Mustakbal, Aida Youth Centre, and Lajee Centre. Through a context-specific pedagogical analysis, it explores how these organisations create informal educational spaces where children, adolescents, and young adults can process traumatic experiences, build a sense of belonging, and experiment with forms of civic participation rooted in everyday collective life.

Particular attention is paid to the meanings attached to these centres locally. One interview describes them as “spaces of light in this gloomy place”, a phrase that captures their role not only as protective environments but also as spaces where social imagination remains possible despite the permanence of violence. This educational persistence becomes especially significant in a camp that has existed for more than seventy years and can no longer be understood through the temporary logic of humanitarian emergency. Aida shows how the refugee camp has become a permanent political and social framework in which suspended citizenship, daily resistance, and practices of community care are constantly renegotiated.

The analysis shows that informal education plays a decisive role in producing concrete forms of inclusion and in reinterpreting the right to education under occupation. These practices respond to structural deficiencies produced by military control, while also creating possibilities for collective existence that go beyond humanitarian management. Through memory work, artistic production, sport, storytelling, and civic engagement, these organisations generate forms of empowerment that connect democratic participation to everyday resistance. Analysing these experiences helps illuminate how education, under conditions of occupation and colonial domination, continues to function as a language of resistance, a practice of future-making, and a concrete exercise of democracy in daily life.