Drawing Unequal Childhoods: Ethics, Memory, and Material Testimony in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
Friday, November 20, 2026 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1Julie Johnson Kidd Hall, Waldstraße 15, 13165 Berlin
This talk introduces Innocent Knowledge, a collaborative research and public humanities project centered on nearly four hundred drawings created by children ages five to fourteen across Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel between October 2024 and June 2025. Encountered together, the drawings render visible the radically unequal conditions under which childhood unfolds across the region. The lecture reflects on the project’s conceptual and ethical foundations: the decision to juxtapose Israeli and Palestinian children’s work without imposing narrative symmetry; the refusal to interpret individual images; the use of context rather than analysis to mediate meaning; and the implications of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for visual expression in wartime. Taken together, the drawings invite us to consider what it means to treat children not as symbols of conflict, but as agents of testimony and presence.
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Katharina Galor is an art historian and archaeologist working on visual and material culture in Israel/Palestine, with particular interests in gender, memory, and cultural heritage. She teaches at Brown University and is currently a Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York. Her latest book is Out of Gaza: A Story of Love, Exile, and Friendship (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2025).
Email: [email protected]