Becoming political: Palestinian Arab Women's pathways to agency and subjectivity in Israeli municipal councils

This article reconceptualizes Palestinian Arab women's participation in Israeli municipal politics as a gendered process of political learning and subject formation under conditions of institutional exclusion. Integrating Freirean critical pedagogy with feminist institutionalism, it examines how unequal access to political knowledge, informal rules, and lived experience shape political learning, critical consciousness, and political agency. Drawing on interviews with thirty women who served in municipal roles between 2013 and 2023, the study identifies recurring but non-linear learning trajectories characterized by self-doubt, system-directed questioning, dialogical reflection in civic and feminist spaces, and growing recognition of structural exclusion. The findings suggest that political learning developed through institutional participation, peer interaction, mutual recognition, and collective interpretation in dialogical spaces. Critical consciousness contributed unevenly to political influence, while agency remained contingent on recognition, access, and institutional constraints. Women's forums, peer networks, and civil society functioned as counter-institutional learning spaces where uncertainty was collectively reinterpreted and political subjectivity developed. Political participation is thus understood as an unequal and relational process of political learning, subject formation, and contingent agency.