Music as sumud: children’s sonic placemaking in Gaza, 2023–2025

Abstract

This study is the first, within a context of conflict and war, to centre children’s voices through a theoretical and empirical lens that integrates music, with the concepts of placemaking and sumud. Through a unique multi-modal approach that combines YouTube videos with case studies from within Gaza, this article examines the significance of music in children’s lives during the 2023–2025 war. By reframing placemaking as an everyday survival strategy, an insurgent spatial practice, and a mode of anti-colonial resistance, this article draws on critical childhood studies to foreground children’s psychosocial well-being, social, and cultural agency. It examines how Palestinian children, operating within profoundly unequal and violent conditions, mobilised music, invariably organised by adults; and embodied sumud (steadfastness) to appropriate, rework, and contest the war-torn spatialities of Gaza. It shows how music helps reconstruct disrupted childhoods, strengthens collective identity and belonging, and supports cultural resistance. The broader significance of this article lies in its illumination of how children actively participate in shaping spatial and cultural meaning through the medium of music, under conditions of protracted conflict, offering new insights into resistance, resilience, and placemaking in global childhoods.