Article by Our Department’s Visiting Researcher Dr. Dalal Bajes Published in Incarceration Journal

The work by Dr. Dalal Bajes, a visiting researcher in our university’s Department of Sociology, titled “Between ‘Joseph’s School’ and ‘Jonah’s Whale’: Palestinian Women’s Coping Strategies and the Temporal Politics of Incarceration”, was published in April 2026 in the SAGE-affiliated journal Incarceration.

The study examines the coping and endurance strategies developed by Palestinian women under prison regimes that have shifted across different periods. Based on interviews with 65 former female detainees, archival documents, and published narratives, the article challenges approaches that treat resilience as a fixed psychological trait; instead, it conceptualizes it as a practice shaped by historical transformations in prison conditions.

Based on the women’s narratives, the article develops two original concepts: while “Joseph’s School” refers to periods where relative order, collective organization, and temporal continuity were possible, “Jonah’s Whale” describes processes where oppression intensifies, time is suspended, and relational spaces are constricted.

Through testimonies spanning from the late 1960s to the present, the study analyzes how practices such as learning, symbolic resistance, establishing intimacy, and envisioning the future emerged and how they have been restricted over time. By centering the experiences of Palestinian women, the work offers a significant contribution that highlights the temporal and relational dimensions of incarceration regimes.