Session: (WITHDRAWN) Domicide As Sociocide: The Settler Colonial State and the Cruelty of Dismemberment (Society for Social Work and Research 25th Annual Conference - Social Work Science for Social Change)

Building on multi-disciplinary literature that looks at domicide from a psycho-social and political economic perspective and relying on analyses offered by Palestinian social work scholar-activists, the proposed panel offers a critical social work perspective to the study of domicide and/as dismemberment. Porteous devised the term "domicide" in 1998 to mean "the planned, deliberate, destruction of someone’s home, causing suffering to the dweller". Yet, we argue that the destruction of the "domus", the home, varies in its forms and severity and can occur physically through demolition a house, colonial dispossession a homeland, or forced resettlement (Porteous & Smith, 2001). However, understanding domicide in the settler colony requires recognizing the pyscho-social invasions of the intimate and the structural and mundane disruption of the home/homeland. Basing our analyses on Saleh Abd El Jawad theorization of what he defines as sociocide, we wish to argue that domicide operates as a mode of spiral dismemberment, a regime of sociocide. The attack on the colonized home/homeland (through the policies of displacement, demolitions, evictions, confiscation of land and more), the invasion of families tender ties, and assaults on communities' spaces of childhood, parenting, life, birth and death in the settler colony, as several scholars brilliantly argued, require social worker to historicize their analyses, and consider engaging with domicide as a system of dismemberment; an ongoing regime of sociocide, When domopolitics is enacted violently to evict the native group, and create a settler other, it produces exilic subjects, IDPs and psychologically displaced entities. It invades communities' social relations, to un-parent, unchild, un-home the native, creating major imbalances, losses and social suffering. Structural violence of domicide disrupts the most private spaces of life, home, school, and neighborhoods, violating home's intimate spaces of safety and security in a monotonous, mundane manner. In the Palestinian case, as in other similar settler colonies, the attack on the home/homeland- as the various papers in this panel will show- is domicidal. It is a state legalized, deliberate, ongoing, and permanent crime against the societal relation, to produce exilic subjects, and create instability in the homeland, home, minds, psyches, and lives of colonized. Using a contextually sensitive and bottom up approach, the panel will theorize from those living and witnessing domicide, The panel will share narrations, drawings and voices of community members, examining domicide as sociocide. By proposing an intersectional theorization, such an analysis can contribute to our understanding of the role of social work during an ongoing political violence and the unending social resistance to it. It can open new spaces of thinking and intervening responsibly with domicide as sociocide.