Structural violence in the context of settler colonialism: The case of Palestine

This post forms part of our series in showcasing abstracts of presentations featured at our annual postgraduate interdisciplinary conference on refugee and forced migration research, hosted in November 2018 at The University of Melbourne.

YARA JARALLAH

This presentation will utilise Michel Foucault’s concept of bio-power to demonstrate how life choices can be structured and constrained by political violence in the context of settler colonialism. It draws mainly from Tawil Souri’s historical tracing of the Identity Card regime in Israel/Palestine and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work on the politics of birth in occupied East Jerusalem, to show how Israeli biopolitical measures of discipline and control enacted through surveillance and immobility have affected choices and behaviours of birthing Palestinian women, politicising childbirth and inflicting widespread social and psychological suffering.

Yara Jarallah’s research considers the interplay between family processes (marriage and fertility), war and conflict, and health and well-being outcomes to understand social stratification and inequality. She uses mixed methods, demographic techniques of event history modelling, quantitative methods and qualitative methods in her research. Her work is interdisciplinary and cuts across research in family sociology, demography and public health with a focus on populations in conflict and post-conflict settings including forced migrants predominantly from the Arab World.