Dr. Nour Mohammad Jaber Bader is a Palestinian sociologist and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bethlehem University. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Tunis. Her research focuses on health and education, with particular attention to the intersections of power, knowledge, and lived experience in Palestinian society.
Her work on health examines the lived experiences of women with breast cancer and the social, political, and embodied consequences of mastectomy. Drawing on critical approaches to illness and the body, her research explores how medical, social, and gendered forms of power shape experiences of survival, identity, and recovery. In particular, her work demonstrates how mastectomy disrupts dominant narratives of healing by revealing the ongoing tensions between survival, bodily loss, and the reconstruction of selfhood after illness.
In the field of education, her research investigates the impact of colonial violence on learning, educational institutions, and the right to education. She has contributed to debates on educide, which refers to the destruction of educational possibilities through military policies and restrictions, and scholasticide, which refers to the physical destruction of schools, universities, and educational infrastructure. Through these lines of inquiry, her work examines how power shapes access to knowledge, learning, and future possibilities under conditions of occupation and genocide.
Dr. Bader is the author of "Engineering of Death: Policies of Controlling Silent Bodies", which received the 2023 State of Palestine Award for Social Sciences and Humanities. She is currently a MESA Global Academy Scholar (2026–2027) and a DAWN Feminist Fellow. Her current research examines spaces of motherhood through the concepts of collapse (Al-Inhidam), exploring how maternal subjectivities, practices of care, and social relations are reconfigured under conditions of prolonged violence, uncertainty, and institutional breakdown.
