Normalising the abnormal: Palestinian youth and the contradictions of resilience in protracted conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study explores the construct of resilience by Palestinian youth in the 10th to 12th grades at school living in and around Ramallah in the West Bank. We look at how adolescents themselves interpret and give meaning to the concept of resilience in dehumanising and abnormal conditions. The aim is to 'problematise' the construct to go beyond quantitative research and objective inquiry. Focus groups were conducted with 321 male and female Palestinian students in 15 schools in Ramallah and the surrounding villages. This study presents findings that are consistent with previous research on the value of supportive relationships such as families and friends. Political participation and education are vital to a sense of identity and political resistance. However, a key finding reveals the normalisation of everyday life in fostering resiliency within abnormal living conditions. Palestinian youth, nonetheless, paint a picture of resilience that reveals contradictions and tensions. This study underlines the fluid and dynamic nature of resilience. Despite the desire for order, Palestinian young people complain of emotional distress and boredom. Feelings of desperation are intermingled with optimism. We also argue that the concept of resilience developed in predominantly Western settings ignores a local idiom of communal care and support. International and local organisations providing psychosocial care rely on trauma programmes based on a Western style of counselling. An over-emphasis on individualised intervention overlooks the notion of collective resiliency and fails to build on existing social capital within communities. Policy-makers should do more than 'tweak' preconceived projects to fit the cultural context or to replicate them from one conflict area to another. We should also keep in mind that the search for psychological well-being and justice are not mutually exclusive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".