Home (en)

The CRCG is co-organising with the Human Rights Research Network a lecture and panel talk with prof. Heidi Morrison (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse).

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe,” James Baldwin wrote in 1980.

 

Yet around the world, children’s lives continue to be shaped by the enduring legacies of colonialism—from violence, displacement, and forced separation to detention and the denial of basic rights. But children are not only victims of these systems. They are also agents of survival, resilience, and resistance.

 

This evening begins with a lecture by Professor Heidi Morrison (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse), who will explore nearly a century of Zionist settler-colonial violence against Palestinian children, culminating in the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has targeted more than 21.000 children by now.

 

Drawing on her recently published book, Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children, Morrison asks a vital question on the third anniversary of the start of the Gaza genocide: rather than asking whether Palestinian children resist, what can we learn by asking how they resist? Without romanticizing children’s resistance, her talk considers what Palestinian young people reveal about our shared humanity—and why that humanity is worth fighting for.

 

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion bringing together scholars and advocates working on Palestinian children’s rights, transnational adoption, the history of the Belgian Métis, and child detention. Together, we will examine how colonial ideas about childhood continue to shape injustice—and how children and communities confront, challenge, and resist these erasures.

 

You can find more information about the public event and registration here:

https://hrrn.ugent.be/event/human-rights-de-krook-the-children-are-always-ours-resisting-colonial-oppression-of-childhood/