Charlotte Mertens

Dr Charlotte Mertens is a teaching associate in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship, drawing on ethnographic and archival research, focuses on the politics and ethics of knowledge and representation of sexual violence (in conflict settings and elsewhere), colonialism and decolonisation, and the sexual politics of empire. She has examined how and with what effects conflict-related sexual violence is understood and addressed through socio-political, legal and humanitarian means in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork since 2012. She also works on histories of sexual violence and the linkages between sexualised violence, the state and settler colonialism.

Articles by Charlotte Mertens:

4 February 20254 February 2025 · Indigenous Australia

Teaching Palestine on stolen Indigenous lands

Charlotte Mertens

Refusal is not only possible, it generates different worlds. Refusal insists on the possibility of alternative anti-colonial futures and ways of being. Refusing the University’s erasure of Palestine involves a collective effort in thinking on how we will teach Palestine, the ongoing settler colonial violence and what this means for a place like Australia.