This article takes the reader through the social‐geographies and psycho‐politics of protection and fatherhood. It examines the challenges to fatherhood roles and modes in which Palestinian fathers protect their families and homes in the context of colonialism in Occupied East Jerusalem. It shares and engages with fathers' own voices and experiences, using a bottom‐up, feminist, and decolonial analysis to reveal the complexities, meanings, and concerns of fathers in their role as protectors. The voices gathered revealed a multilayered understanding of fathers' role as protectors in the framework of psychosocial modes, meanings, techniques, transformations, and acts within an insecure context.

Bereaved fathers dealing with political loss provide an under-examined experience of living with unbearable pain. Drawing on an anti-colonial feminist framework, this article analyzes the written and visualized pain of bereaved Palestinian fathers posted on Facebook. This study approaches cyberspace as a meaningful site for theorizing the suffering of a people living under state violence. I focus on three portraits shared by fathers, which include texts, photos, e-comments, and e-interpretations. By considering the narratives and reactions evoked by these portraits, this study reveals complex transformations of individual and collective pain, loss, and grief. The study further suggests that visualizing fathers’ pain on social media provides a space for fathers to navigate trauma. They achieve this by traversing traumatic confusion into a state of survival and agency while challenging structures of dehumanization, dispossession, and death.

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