Fugitive pedagogies: Countering erasure in Gaza

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education and scholasticide: Interrogating policy and praxis on Palestine

Proposal

Since October 2023, the education system of Gaza has been decimated, leaving 658,000 children out of school. The United Nations Human Rights Office (2024) has identified this deliberate targeting of educational institutions as an act of scholasticide. Yet, educators have sustained spaces for learning in their shelters, camps, and other spaces of displacement, against a backdrop of a humanitarian catastrophe inflicted through direct assault, blockade, and a policy of starvation. These fugitive pedagogies—a concept first ascribed to how Black educators affirm Black identity and history in the face of systemic racism through acts of resistance—are what we argue are critical manifestations of sumud and the refusal of Palestinian society to be erased through settler-colonial violence and oppression (Qato, 2025; Givens, 2023). They reflect the importance of education within Palestinian society, both as a right and as a vehicle for liberation.

As in previous emergency responses in Palestine, education has been sustained by individuals who are themselves acutely affected. They do so at great risk to their own personal well-being, and often, without sufficient, if any compensation. Nonetheless, these organic community-based mobilisations remain largely invisible to the outside world and absent within international humanitarian discourse and scholarship on education in emergencies.

This paper presents preliminary findings from an empirical study that seeks to document these acts of fugitivity in the midst of ongoing violence. Through qualitative, virtual, and remote forms of data collection, we explore how and why educators labor under extreme conditions and how this educational labor informs the work of international humanitarian partners who share a responsibility to protect the right to education.

Through ethnographic witnessing (Abu El-Haj, 2023), and in partnership with local education authorities and actors, we highlight the agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of educators in their ordinary solidarities (Zakharia, 2023)--organic actions of care and respect that are shaped by collective resistance and refusals of ongoing occupation.

Our analysis engages with decolonial and antiracist critiques of the global education architecture, including the sector’s ontological and epistemological frames that obscure the political, social, and economic conditions established through colonialism, empire, and capitalism and that operate in ways to diminish the fugitive spaces of education. In doing so, we challenge portrayals of Gaza's educators as helpless and offer a counternarrative that recognizes their efforts to maintain education as a vehicle for preservation, collective memory, and liberation.

Authors

• Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland College Park

• Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland