糖心传媒

Education is often framed as a pathway to opportunity, where learning expands capabilities and opens routes to social and economic mobility. In Palestine, education operates as a site where this familiar narrative is unsettled, exposing how relations of power organise learning, labour, and possibility. Learning is sustained through practices of shared remembrance and collective reflection, particularly where formal educational institutions have been erased through what scholars identify as scholasticide (see Desai et al., 2025; Giroux, 2025; Habash & Rabaia, 2025; Nabulsi, 2009). 

While Amartya Sen鈥檚 capability approach offers an influential language for linking education to freedom, opportunity, and choice (Sen, 1985, 2001), questions remain about how far it can account for military occupation as a living organising structure. Even where young people earn degrees and build skills, their conversion into stable futures is shaped by a political economic model that manages occupation and organises the terms of futurity. Learning emerges instead as a relational and political practice shaped by persistence and the struggle to remain intellectually and socially present, through which what hegemonic systems render invisible is reclaimed (Fasheh, 1990), sustaining self-worth and collective agency. Palestinians conceptualise this as sumud鈥攕teadfastness鈥攜et, as Giacaman (2026) cautions, its appropriation within resilience discourse risks reducing a historically rooted, collective practice of endurance and resistance to settler coloniality into a depoliticised language of adaptation. 

The Arabic term Wa鈥榠 exceeds individual awareness, gesturing toward a collective ethical form of consciousness that binds personal understanding to responsibility for others. This conception is reflected in longstanding Palestinian traditions of storytelling and theatre, where narrative functions as both expression and pedagogy. Adel Tartir, for instance, understood theatre as a way of living, loving, and caring for others鈥斺�榳e live theatre, we breathe it,鈥� rooted in warmth, imagination, and everyday community life (Tartir, 2025). Across artistic interventions and oral histories that sustain testimony and collective memory (see Abd al-Hameed, 2026; Aqrabawi, 2024), storytelling functions as a form of insurgent, embodied learning. One of Tartir鈥檚 productions, Taghribat Saeed bin Fadlallah (1979) tells the story of a man who becomes a circus dog in search of work. The play is a metaphor for labour, dignity, and the struggle to remain human under dispossession. 

In the 1970s, Tartir travelled with what he called Sandouq al-Ajab, the 鈥榖ox of wonder鈥欌�攁 form of cultural technology through which storytelling sustained imagination, memory, and collective life. Such technologies do not reside in the 鈥榤agic鈥� of Silicon Valley, but in the persistence of a people who refuse disappearance. In Gaza, digital witnessing鈥攚here people and families record their lives under systematic targeting of civilian life鈥攖ransforms personal testimony into a form of public pedagogy (Hamdan, 2025). Through such acts, documenting and bearing witness become insurgent learning to preserve consciousness under fragmentation, ensuring experience remains visible, communicable, and politically meaningful.

In the early stages of fieldwork, I invited graduates working in tech-related fields to draw maps of their journeys into professional life. Many began with diagrams that resembled linear pathways 鈥� education, graduation, employment, milestones, stability 鈥� reflecting the models that dominate development discourse. Our conversations unfolded through Muj膩wara (neighbouring) (Sukarieh, 2019), a relational practice through which narratives were revisited and deepened over time. But as our conversations unfolded, these maps became more complicated. They revealed detours, interruptions, waiting, and decisions that redirected trajectories. One participant refused the exercise entirely and told me: 鈥淢y map is disfigured. I cannot draw it.鈥� In contexts marked by surveillance and political violence, this also requires political reflexivity (Abdelnour & Abu Moghli, 2021). I therefore work with an ethics of opacity, recognising that some experiences remain guarded or unspeakable. 

Graduates described investing significant effort in acquiring new skills and refining professional profiles, only to encounter prolonged periods of waiting and rejection. One recounted submitting hundreds of job applications before receiving a single interview, each application representing hours of unpaid preparation and self-directed learning. Behind these efforts lay a persistent awareness that qualifications alone could not overcome structural barriers shaped by military checkpoints, donor dependency, and ongoing occupation. Short-term projects offered temporary relief but rarely provided continuity or security. Delays in payment or funding interruptions were often interpreted by international investors as individual unreliability, obscuring the broader conditions that produced such disruptions. Over time, the repeated need to reskill and reapply generated professional fatigue and exhaustion, as graduates were continually required to demonstrate resilience in environments offering few guarantees. Education, hence, functioned less as a route toward stable employment and more as a means of sustaining purpose. 

The lives described by these graduates rarely resembled the orderly progression implied by dominant development models. I thus understand their trajectories as forms of constellational being, in which education, work, and personal life appear as interconnected experiences shaped by interruption and endurance. Educational and professional trajectories appeared fragmented by political events, economic instability, and moments of enforced stillness, though these fragments did not amount to disorder alone. Participants often spoke of their lives as composed of scattered but connected experiences, shaped by family support, community ties, cultural practice, and ethical commitments that sustained them through uncertainty. 

One graduate described how their confidence had been nurtured through folklore dance (Dabke) and familial encouragement, even as they carried the unspoken weight of military detention. Another developed an online game grounded in Palestinian history. This suggests education operates as a relational process, sustained through networks of care and shared meaning afore institutional continuity. Learning becomes a way of holding together disparate experiences without resolving them into a single story of progress. Endurance thus emerges not as passive survival, but as an active form of consciousness, and an effort to remain intellectually and ethically present when the very conditions of possibility are under sustained attack.

Comparative and international education has long been entangled with the shifting logics of world order, international relations, and global political economy, all of which shape how education is imagined, governed, and mobilised across different contexts (Jones, 2007; Klerides, 2023). What, then, does education signify in a world where the accumulation of skills is increasingly detached from the promise of opportunity and human dignity? International education frameworks often rest on assumptions of stability, continuity, and predictable progression, assumptions that echo broader neoliberal logics of efficiency, competition, and individual advancement. Such provisions, however, cannot be taken for granted in many parts of the world. When life and livelihood are targeted, learning assumes a different significance. It becomes a means of sustaining dignity and ethical orientation. Palestinian graduates鈥� narratives invite a rethinking of what counts as educational success, drawing attention to forms of knowledge that emerge through endurance and collective responsibility. These forms of learning may not align neatly with policy metrics or development indicators, but they carry profound social and political meaning. By attending to education as a lived, relational practice shaped by historical and material realities, scholars of international and comparative education can better account for how knowledge persists, adapts, and remains vital under forces that seek to erode it.

This blog post is based on We鈥檃m Hamdan鈥檚 award-winning submission for the 糖心传媒 Student Writing Award

References 

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Abdelnour, S., & Abu Moghli, M. (2021). Researching violent contexts: A call for political reflexivity. Organization, 13505084211030646. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211030646

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