Settler colonial unchilding: Nadera Shahloub-Kevorkian, ‘Children’s cartographies of refusal and life-making: wilfulness and decoloniality amid spaces of death in Gaza’, Children’s Geographies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial unchilding: Nadera Shahloub-Kevorkian, ‘Children’s cartographies of refusal and life-making: wilfulness and decoloniality amid spaces of death in Gaza’, Children’s Geographies, 2026

18Oct26

Abstract: This article examines Palestinian children at the nexus of settler-colonial control and genocidal violence, foregrounding their capacities to resist, reconstitute life, and sustain childhood under extreme dispossession. Building on the concept of unchilding, it shows how children are targeted by colonial and genocidal violence while also interrupting these processes through their bodies, spatial practices, and communal relations. Conceptualizing children as producers of knowledge, politics, and relational practices of liveability and futurity, the article challenges representations of children as passive victims. Drawing on a child-guided epistemic methodology and childist philosophical framework, it centres children’s affects, voices, bodies, spaces, and relationalities as generative sites of knowledge. The analysis examines fifty media and social media posts from publicly accessible accounts collected over two years of genocidal violence, attending to children’s everyday routines, spatial practices, and cartographic renderings of violence. It identifies wilfulness as a spatial, affective, and cartographic practice: an embodied insistence on occupying space, sustaining relational life, and mapping violence in ways that refuse erasure and fragmentation. Childhood wilfulness thus becomes a political and epistemic intervention through which children affirm life, continuity, and childhood liveability, sustaining childhood as a horizon of decolonial possibility amid genocidal unchilding.

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