Introducing... Dr Rawan Nasser

Rawan Nasser has a PhD in Social Work. She is a researcher interested in the mental health and psychosocial experiences of Palestinian refugees. Her work bridges trauma studies, decolonial methodology, and critical social work practice. She focuses on how the uprooting during the Nakba (1948 war), ongoing settler-colonial violence, and intergenerational memory shape the lives of Palestinian refugees and marginalized communities, with particular attention to processes of silencing and breaking silencing across generations.

Her doctoral research, grounded in four years of fieldwork, aimed to understand the psychological and social experiences of Palestinian refugees from Lydda, focusing on both first and second generations. The study examined how continuous trauma, control, and displacement affect their daily lives and memory, as well as how they build resilience against the ongoing and lived trauma. 

Project summary

During her fellowship with the CCSC she is examining the psychological experiences of Palestinian children during the ongoing war on Gaza. She traces how colonial structures systematically target children's psychology—from the 1948 Nakba to the present—through both external erasure and internalized responses to trauma. Through an arts-based methodology (draw and write) with refugee children (aged 6–15) in West Bank camps, she explores how young people navigate life under ongoing conflict while resisting colonial violence through memory preservation, storytelling, and creative expression.

This research advances critical childhood studies through a decolonial perspective, exploring childhood as a socially, culturally, and historically situated experience across diverse global contexts. By framing Palestinian children as active political and knowledge-making agents rather than passive subjects, my work centers their experiences and perspectives, while investigating how childhood can serve as both a social role and a site of resistance in settings marked by prolonged and structural violence. Through arts-based methods with refugee children, this project contributes to innovative, interdisciplinary research approaches and supports efforts to promote social justice for children and young people. It provides new insights into how children navigate and resist ongoing colonization, offering theoretical contributions that connect childhood, memory, and resilience with research, advocacy, and policy in contexts of long-term conflict. This work aligns with the CCSC’s mission of generating knowledge that highlights children's voices, agency, and social experiences, advancing the Centre’s goal of fostering research with real-world impact.