AFWG Core Group Members

LAMIS ABU NAHLEH

Associate Professor, Institute for Women’s Studies, Birzeit University

Lamis Abu Nahleh is an associate professor and researcher at Birzeit University in Palestine. She has conducted research on gender and education, the Palestinian family and household, and gender case studies in gender and various development sectors, including women’s micro-credit projects, community-based rehabilitation programs, gender integration into industrial schools, gender analysis and planning in the Palestinian National Authority, Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Youth and Sports, Empowerment in the Palestinian context, and “Honor Killing” in Palestine. She is also engaged in training activities in the area of gender policy analysis and planning, and in the planning and evaluations of gender integration and mainstreaming in development policies,plansandprojects.

Research Project: Marriages and Movements: Weddings and Wars

Links: http://old.birzeit.edu/people/lamis-abu-nahleh

Selected Publications:

  • Honor Killing: Honor Crimes in Palestine from 2004-2006, published by Palestinian Non-Governmental Organization Against Domestic Violence Against Women (Al Muntada), Palestine, 2007. (Also available in Arabic)
  • Six Families: Survival and Mobility in Times of Crisis in Living Palestine: Family, Survival, ResistanceandMobility under Occupation, edited by Lisa Taraki NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. (Also now available in Arabic, published by Institute of Palestine Studies)
  • Promoting the Status of Gender in The Community Based Rehabilitation Program in Palestine, a Working Paper, Jerusalem: Diakonia /NAD, March 2003.
  • The Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sports: A Case Study of Gender Integration, by Lamis Abu Nahleh, Islah JadandLisa Taraki, was published by Direction du Developpement et de la Cooperation (DDC) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Regional Support Office for the Arab States Urban Management Programme, Cairo, Egypt: June 2000.
  • Gender Planning, Vocational Education, and Technical Training (VETT) in Palestine, published by the World University Service (UK), September 1996. (Also published in Arabic)

 

IBRAHIM ELNUR

Associate Professor of Political Science & Coordinator, Development Studies Program, American University in Cairo

D.Phil.inDevelopmentstudies, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, Doctorate in Economic Science, KMU, Budapest, Hungary,December,1979, B.Sc. (honors), Pure Theory, University of Khartoum,April,1973, a B.Sc. in Economics, Cairo University, Egypt (1970).  Previously: Director of the Middle East Research Awards (MEAwards) at the Population Council, Cairo (1999-2001), Visiting Researcher, OAS-AUC, Co-founder and coordinator of the Group for Alternative Policies for Sudan (GAPS) (1996-1999), Associate Professor, El Fatih University, Tripoli, Libya (1995-1996), Head Department of Economics, Juba University, Sudan (1990-1995), and Assistant Professor at the same university since 1986.

Dr. Elnur is currently the Graduate advisor, Political Science Department at AUC.  Elnur is the co-coordinator of the Sudanese Diaspora Research Group (SDRN).  His current research andteachinginterestsincludesthefollowing: Development and International Political Economy, population dynamics withemphasisonmigration-developmentnexus, public policy,economicsofeducation, health, and war and reconstruction.  His publications and research interests focus onreconstructionofwartorncommunities, thestateandglobalization, urban poverty, changing conditions of educated elite reproduction, new urbanities-ruralities, modernities; survival strategies, feminization of the labor process and family dynamics, alternative development policies and the economics of education and health.

Research Project: War, Diasporas, and Reproduction of Social Class among Sudanese Elite

Links: http://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/ibrahimelnur

Selected Publications:

  • From Political Patronage to Empowerment: A Critique of Subsidies' Systems, Anti-poverty Policies and Inequalities in Rentier and Quasi-Rentiers Regimes in The Arab World,backgroundPaperforthe Arab Human Development Report 2013 (Unpublished).
  • The Changing Hydraulics of Conflict and Cooperation in the Nile Basin: The Demise of Bilateralism, in Sharif Elmusa (ed.), Cairo Papers in Social Sciencespecialissueon:TheBurdenof Resources: Oil and Water in the Gulf Region and The Nile Basin, AUC Press, (June,2011).
  • Chasing Modernities: On Mobility-development nexuses: The Challenges of Harnessing Transformative Potential”, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence (July 2010), http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/14407.
  • "Contested Sudan: The Political Economy of war and Reconstruction", Routledge Middle East Studies, Routledge, 200, 2012.
  • Sudan: From Prolonged Civil Wars to Fragile Peace, background paper for the Arab Human Development 2009 (UNDP, AHDR), 2009.
  • “Differentiation in the Educational Systems, Diasporas and Reproduction of Educated Elites,” in Social Science in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran: Determinants, State and Potentials ed. A. Ben Hafaiedh and M. El Jaziri, 2004.
  • "11 September and the Widening North-South Gap: Root Causes of Terrorism in the Global Order,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 2003.
  • “The Second Boat of African New Diaspora: Looking at the Other Side of the Global Divide with Emphasis on Sudan,” African Issues, 2002.

HODA ELSADDA

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cairo University

Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University.  She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University,andwasCo-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. In 1992, she co-founded and co-edited Hagar, an interdisciplinary journal in women’s studies published in Arabic. In 1997, she co-founded and is currently Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Women and Memory Forum, a research organization which focuses on reading Arab cultural history from a gender-sensitive perspective. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies JMEWS; member of the Advisory Board of the Durham Modern Languages Series; Associate Editor of the Online Edition of the Encyclopedia of Women in Muslim Cultures; member of the Board of Directors of The Global Fund for Women (2009-); Consultant Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Second Edition, (2006-2009); member of the Advisory Board of al-Raida.

Research Projects: Blogging in Egypt and Palestine: The Creation of New Cultural Public Spheres,Genderand Nation in the Literature of the 1990s in Egypt

Links: www.wmf.org.eg

Selected Publications

  • 2012 Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008.  Edinburgh University Press and Syracuse University Press.
  • 2012 (edited with an introduction) al-Niswiyya wa al-Tarikh (Feminism and History), translated by Abir Abbas. Cairo, the Women and Memory Forum.
  • 2011 “Women’s Rights Activism in post-Jan25 Egypt: Combating the Shadow of the First Lady Syndrome,” in Middle East Law and Governance 3 (2011): 84-93.
  • 2011 “A ‘phantom freedom in a phantom modernity’?: Protestant Missionaries, Domestic Ideology and Narratives of Modernity in an Arab Context,” in Rethinking History, 15:2 (June 2011): 209-228.
  • 2010 (edited with an introduction) ‘Intaj al-Ma’rifa ‘an al-‘Alam al-‘Arabi (Mapping the Production of Knowledge on the Arab World).  Proceedings of a conference held in Cairo in July 2007.  Cairo, the Supreme Council of Culture.
  • 2010 “Arab Women Bloggers: The Emergence of Literary Counterpublics.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3:3 (2010) pp. 312-332.
  • 2010 “Dialogue Section: The Arab Feminist Research and Activism: Bridging the Gap between the Theoretical and Practical," Feminist Theory 11:2 (August 2010) pp.121-127.
  • “Egypt,” Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide 1873-1999. Edited Radwa Ashour, Ferial Ghazoul and Hasna Mekdashi, trans. By Mandy McClure. Cairo and New York, The American University Press, 2008. The article was first published in Arabic in 2004 as “Al-Kitaba al-`Ibda’iyyalilNisa’ fi Misr” (Women’s Creative Writing in Egypt) inThakiralilMustaqbal: Mawsu’atal-Mar’aal-`Arabiyya(The Memory of the Future: An Encyclopaedia of Arab Women’s Writings). Cairo, Nour and The Supreme Council of Culture, pp.7-59.
  • "Imaging the ‘New Man’: Gender and Nation in Arab Literary Narratives in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3: 2, pp. 31-55, Spring 2007.
  • "Gendered Citizenship: Discourses on Domesticity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4:1 pp.1-28, 2006.
  • "Discourses on Women’s Biographies and Cultural Identity: Twentieth Century Representations of the Life of `Aisha Bint Abi Bakr," Feminist Studies 27:1 (Spring), pp.37-64, 2001.

 

OMNIA EL SHAKRY

Omnia El Shakry, Professor of History, University of California Davis

Omnia El Shakry specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, with a particular emphasis on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt. El Shakry’srecently published book, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017), traces the development of psychoanalysis and discourses of subjectivity in postwar Egypt as part of the transregional history of ideas of the self and the unconscious. She is currently writing a coda to the book on the translation of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality into Arabic and is developing a new research project on the intellectual and religious encounter between Catholicism and Islamintwentieth century Egypt.

Selected Publications:

BARBARA LETHEM IBRAHIM

Director of the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement, American University in Cairo

Barbara Lethem Ibrahim is the founding director of the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement, established in 2006 at the American University in Cairo. Prior to that, she served for fourteen years as regional director for West Asia and North Africa at the Population Council. From 1982 to 1990, she was program officer at the Ford Foundation regional office in Cairo, responsible for programs in urban poverty,microenterpriselending, and gender studies. She has been an international visiting scholar at the Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University (2008) and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (2005). She served as a past or current board member of African Women in Crisis, Virtual Activism, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies Egypt, and Voices for a Democratic Egypt. She speaks internationally on the topics of Arab youth in civic participation and philanthropy/social investing in the Arab world. Her BA is from DePauw University, MA in Sociology from the American University of Beirut,andPhDinSociology from Indiana University. In 1999 she was inducted into the International Educators’ Hall of Fame. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies in 2003.

Research Project: The Civic Struggles of Urban Egyptian Youth

Links:

https://business.aucegypt.edu/research/centers/gerhart

http://www.facebook.com/gerhartcenter

http://twitter.com/gerhartcntr

Selected Publications:

  • Youth, Service, and Pathways to Democracy in Egypt. Voices working papers series, American University in Cairo. 2011
  • From Charity to Social Change: Trends in Arab Philanthropy (chapter author, volume editor with Dina Sherif) American University in Cairo Press: October, 2008.
  • Strengthening Philanthropy and Civic Engagement in the Arab World: A Mission for the John D. Gerhart Center Voices in Philanthropy and Civic Engagement, Working Paper #1, American University in Cairo, October 2006.
  • Negotiating Leadership Roles: Young Women’s Experience in Rural Egypt, with Martha Brady and Rania Salem. Women’s Studies Quarterly, special issue on “Women and Development: Rethinking Policy and Reconceptualizing Practice”, 2004.
  • The Costs of Marriage in Egypt: A Hidden Variable in the New Arab Demography, with Diane Singerman. The New Arab Family (ed. Hopkins). Cairo Papers in Social Science, volume 24, numbers 1/2, 80-116, 2003.
  • Decline in Female Circumcision in Egypt: Evidence and Interpretation, with Omaima El-Gibaly, Barbara Mensch, and Wesley Clark. Social Science and Medicine. volume 54 no. 2. January, 2002.

 

PENNY JOHNSON

Associate Researcher, Institute of Women’s Studies

Penny Johnson is an independent researcher and an associate researcher at the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine where she is the co-editor of the Institute’s Annual Review of Women’s Studies. Her recent publications and research interests have focused on women’s narratives of the Palestinian present,wivesandfamiliesofpolitical prisoners, youth perceptions of proper and improper marriages and gender and the second Palestinian intifada. She was a member of the first Palestinian National Commission for Poverty Eradication and is an associate editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Research Project: Marriages and Movements: Weddings and Wars

Selected Publications

  • With Rita Giacaman. "Our Life is Prison": The Triple Captivity of Wives and Mothers of Palestinian Political Prisoners, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 9:3 (autumn 2013).
  • Introduction: Neither Homeland or Exile Are Words, in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, edited Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh. Delhi: Women. Unlimited, 2012, Northampton: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2013.
  • Displacing Palestine: Palestinian Householding in an Era of Asymmetrical War, Politics and Gender 6:2, 2010.
  • Unmarried in Palestine: Embodiment and (dis)Empowerment in the Lives of Single Palestinian Women, IDS Bulletin, Volume 41, Number 2, March 2010.
  • What Rosemary Saw: Reflections on Palestinian Women as Tellers of the Palestinian Present,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 152, Summer 2009.

ISLAH JAD

Associate Professor, International Affairs, Qatar University

Dr. Jad is one of the founders of the Women’s Studies Institute at Birzeit University in 1994, and of WATC (Women’s Affairs Technical Committee) in 1992, a national coalition for women. She has published many works on Palestinian and Arab women political participation and political development. She was also a co-author for the Arab Human Development Report of 2005. Dr. Jad obtained her Ph.D. in Gender and Development from the Department of Development Studies, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies –University of London) in 2004. Dr. Jad is a senior researcher on gender issues in the Arab region and Palestine, and has done many consultations for different Palestinian ministries, international organizations, and NGOs. She is also a senior gender trainer. Dr. Jad is an Associate Professor working in the Cultural Studies Department and the MA program on Gender and Development at Birzeit University in Palestine. Currently, Dr. Jad is a Campbell Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is fluent in Arabic, English, and French.

Research Project: The Politics of Group Weddings in Palestine: Political and Gender Tensions

Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islah_Jad

Selected Publications:

  • The ‘NGOisation’ of the Arab Women’s Movement, IDS Bulletin, Sussex University Press, October 2003.
  • Mobilization without Sovereignty in the Oslo Period, in SherifaZuhur,WomenandGenderinthe Islamic World, Berkeley:UCIAandUCPress, 2003.
  • Islamist Women of Hamas: A New Women’s Movement? In Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (ed.) On Shifting Ground; Muslim Women in a Global Era, Feminist Press, 2005.
  • Women at the Cross-Roads, (in Arabic), Muwatin Institute for the Study of Democracy. Palestine.
  • Arab Human Development Report (2005): Women’s Empowerment, UNDP, New York. Launched on December 2006.

 

SUAD JOSEPH

Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor, University of California, Davis

Most of Dr. Joseph's anthropological field research has focused on her native Lebanon. Her early work investigated the politicization of religious sects in Lebanon leading up to the civil war in 1975--questions of ethnicity and state, local community organization and development. That work led her to consider the impact of women's visiting networks on local and national politics, and the relationships between local communities, community organizations and the state. Joseph developed a long-term research program on the interface of gender, family and state in the Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, with comparative work in Iraq. Central to this research program has been her work theorizing culturally situated notions of "self", "rights", "citizenship" in the context of different political regimes and in the context of the pressures and processes of globalization. She is carrying out a long-term research project following a cohort of children in a Lebanese village, observing, as they grow, how they learn their notions of rights, responsibilities, nationality, citizenship; how these notions come to be gendered; and how the notions are transferred from family arenas into political/public arenas. The project includes analysis of citizenship, family and transnationalism as these families have migrated to the US and Canada over the course of the study.  She leads a project analyzing the representation of Arabs, Muslims, Arab American, and Muslim Americans in major American print news media. Prof. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (which evolved into the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association), founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS) and the Arab Families Research Group. She founded and directs a six-university consortium including the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, the Lebanese American University, Birzeit University, American University of Sharjah, and UC Davis. She was president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2010-2011. She is co-founder and founding president of the Arab American Studies Association and co-founder of the Association for Middle East Anthropology.  She is General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.  She has edited or co-edited 9 books, and published over 100 articles in journals and books.  She has been a faculty at the University of California, Davis since 1976 where she is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, and Faculty Assitant to the Chancellor.  She is founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at UC Davis and  was awarded the UC Davis Prize – the largest undergraduate teaching and research prize in the United States.

Research Project: Transnational Lebanese Families and Youth: Moveable Citizenship

Links: http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu, http://mesa.ucdavis.edu/

Selected Publications:

  • ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN AND ISLAMIC CULTURES. LEIDEN: BRILL.
    • 2003 Volume I. Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources.
    • 2005 Volume II. Family, Law, and Politics.
    • 2006 Volume III. Family, Body, Sexualities, Health.
    • 2007 Volume IV. Economics, Education, MobilityandSpace.
    • 2007 Volume V. Practices, InterpretationsandRepresentations.
    • 2007 Volume VI. Index and Supplement.
    • 2010-Ongoing Supplements I, II, III, IV, EWIC Online
    • 2013 Women and Islamic Cultures. Disciplinary Paradigms and Approaches: 2003 - 2013
  • Edited and Co-Edited Books
    • 1999 Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, SelfandIdentity. Suad Joseph, Ed., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
    • 2000 Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East. Suad Joseph, Ed., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
    • 2001 Gender and Power in the Middle East. Suad Joseph, Susan Slymovics, co-Eds, University of Pennsylvania Press.
    • 2010 Framings: Rethinking Arab Family Projects. Rethinking Arab Family Projects

RAY JUREIDINI

Professor of Ethics and Migration, Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha.

Ray Jureidini is Professor of Ethics and Migration at the Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. Until December 2011 he was Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Ray has previously held the position of associate professor and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the American University of Beirut where he began researching and publishing on human rights issues concerning migrant domestic workers.  His research interests lie in the fields of industrial and economic sociology, migration, human rights, racism, and xenophobia. In 2012, he spent a year as research consultant for the Center of Design Innovation at Qatar Foundation in Doha. He was one of the authors of the Qatar Foundation’s 2013 Mandatory Standards for Migrant Worker Welfare and continues to work on migrant labour issues focusing on the GCC.

Recent Publications:

  • (2017) Transnational Culture of Corruption in Migrant Labour Recruitment, Migration Research Leaders Syndicate, International Organization for Migration.
  • (2017) Wage Protection Systems and Programmes in the GCC. European University Institute and Gulf Research Center, Research Report, No. 1/2017.
  • (2017) (with Latife Reda) “The Convergence of Migrants and Refugees: Western and Muslim Perspectives”, Sociology of Islam, 5, June 2017: 224-247
  • (2017) “Irregular Migration in Qatar: The Role of Legislation, Policies, and Practices” in Philippe Fargue & Nasra Shah (eds) Skilful Survivals: Irregular Migration to the Gulf, Gulf Research Center, Cambridge: 135-160.
  • (2017) "The Need for Systemic Reform in Migrant Labour Recruitment", in S Irudaya Rajan (ed) India Migration Report 2016: Gulf Migration, Routledge: 36-47.
  • (2017) “Islamic Ethics and Migrant Labor in Qatar” in Toseef Azid and Necmettin Kızılkaya (eds) Labour in an Islamic Setting: Theory and Practice, London, Routledge.
  • (2016)  Ways Forward in Recruitment of ‘Low-skilled’ Migrant Workers in Asia-Arab States Corridor, International Labor Organization White Paper, International Labor Organization Regional Office forArab States, Beirut.
  • (2014) Migrant Labor Recruitment to Qatar, Bloomsbury/Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar.
  • (2014) “Arab Gulf States: Recruitment of Asian Workers”, Gulf Labor Markets and Migration, Migration Policy Center (European University Institute) & Gulf Research Center (Cambridge), GLMM - EN - No. 3/2014.
  • (2014) “The Use and Abuse of Domestic Workers: case studies in Lebanon and Egypt”, in Wenona Giles, Mary Romero and Valerie Preston (eds) When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work, Ashgate.

 

 

MONA CHEMALI KHALAF

Economics and Gender Consultant, Former Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University

Mona Chemali Khalaf is an economist and an independent consultant on gender and development issues. She is a former Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis Initiative (GERPA), established by the World Bank and CAWTAR in 2006. She is a member of the editorial board of Al-Raida, a quarterly magazine dealing with women’s issues in the Arab world. Previously she was a member of the Lebanese NGO Commission for the Preparation of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the Lebanese National Commission for Women Affairs (1996-1999), and the Board of Trustees of the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), 1996-1999. She was the senior coordinator of the Basic Living Skills Program (2003), a non-formal integrated educational kit in Arabic, geared towards illiterate and semi-literate women in the Arab world. She has written extensively about women, gender, economics, and the labor market. Her research presently focuses on migration and women.

Research Project: Exploring the migration of young Lebanese couples to the Arab Gulf, the reasons behind it and its impact on the various members of the family.

Website link: https://business.aucegypt.edu/research/centers/gerhart

Selected Publications:

  • “Lebanon” in Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa, Freedom House (2010).
  • Women’s Control over Economic Resources and Access to Financial Resources, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) (2009).
  • “Male Migration and the Lebanese Family: The Impact on the Wife Left Behind”, The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (special issue on War and Transnational Families), Fall 2009.
  • Evaluating the Status of Lebanese Women in light of the Beijing Platform for Action, the United Nations Development Fund for Women. Arab State Regional Office (both in English and Arabic), 2002.
  • “Women in Post War Lebanon”, in Kail, C. Ellis, Lebanon’s Second Republic, Prospects for the Twenty-first Century, University Press of Florida, 2002.
  • “Women’s Studies: MiddleEast and North Africa”, in Routledge International Encyclopedia for Women, Vol. 4, 2000.

EILEEN KUTTAB

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Institute of Women Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine

President of the Teachers and Employees Syndicate, Birzeit University, Palestine

Eileen Kuttab is an assistant professor in sociology and a faculty member and researcher at Institute of Women Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. She is a founding member of the Institute of Women Studies and founding director from 1998 until August 2008. As a woman activist, she has been involved with grassroots women’s organizations and has served on boards of trustees of human rights and development research centers. Her recent involvement in research and advocacy focused on “Alternative Development: Social and economic rights as a realistic approach to development under colonial occupation." Her main research interests focus on the relation of feminism to nationalism, social movements and in particular the women’s movement, gender and development particularly women’s work in the informal sector and coping strategies, neo-liberalismandhighereducation, and tools for communityempowermentthroughcommunitybasedorganizations. Her recent work in AFWG focuses on youth and political participation.

She is the first elected woman to head the Teachers and Employees Syndicate at Birzeit University in Palestine since 2011. A core member of the Arab Families Working Group, a collaborative group of researchers working on Arab families.

Research Project: Palestinian Youth: Construction of Desires and Imaginaries in Different Social Contexts

Selected Publications:

  • Kuttab, E. "Coping with Conflict: Palestinian Families and Households, against all Odds. in eds. Di Marco, Graciela   Tabbush, Constanza  (2011) Feminisms, Democratization and Radical Democracy: Case studies in South and Central America, Middle East and North Africa. UNSAMEDITA. Buenos Aires.
  • Kuttab, E. 2010. “Empowerment as Resistance: Conceptualizing Palestinian Women’s empowerment in “Development” 2010, 53(2): 247-253.
  • Kuttab, E. "Palestinian Women's Organizations: Global Cooption and Local Contradiction" in Cultural Dynamics, 2008, 20(2): 99-117.
  • Kuttab, E.  The Paradox of Women’s Work: Coping, Crisis, and Family Survival ed. Taraki L. In Living Palestine, Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation. Syracuse University Press, 2006.

 

JIHAD MAKHOUL

Associate Professor, Chair: Department of Health Promotion and Community Health, American University of Beirut

Jihad Makhoul is an associate professor and chair at the Department of Health Promotion and Community Health, at the Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut. Her research and publications havefocusedonwar affected populationssuchasinternal displaced families of the Lebanese civil war as well as border crossing refugee populations, such as Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. She is also interested in applications of research methodology, such as research ethics,qualitativeresearchandcommunity based research in the Arab Region.

Research Projects: Displaced Arab Families: Coping and Changes in post-war Beirut; Displaced Arab Families Coping and Changes: Iraqi Refugees in Lebanon; A Situation Analysis of Applied Research Ethics involving Human subjects in Lebanon and Qatar: challenges, dilemmas and implications for capacity building.

Selected Publications

  • Starting Over from scratch: youth social support and youth coping with internal displacement, In Family and Community Health,2011.
  • “I felt that I was benefiting someone”: Youth as agents of change in a refugee community project, In Health Education Research, 2011.
  • Developing a logic model for youth mental health: Participatory research with a refugee community in Beirut, In Health Policy and Planning,2001.
  • Parental attitudes and perceptions towards their children’s participation in clinical research: a developing country perspective. In Medical Ethics, 2010.
  • Development and validation of the Arab Youth Mental Health Scale In Community Mental Health Journal, 2010.
  • Obtaining informed consent: observations from community research with refugee and impoverished youth, In Medical Ethics, 2009.
  • Displaced Arab Families: mothers’ voices on living and coping in post-war Beirut, In Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, 2009.
  • Violence: the Silent Determinant of Child Labor, Journal of Children and Poverty, 2004.
  • An Ethnographic Study of the Consequences of Social and Structural Forces on Children: The Case of Two Low Income Beirut Suburbs, in Environment and Urbanization, 2003.
  • A Structural Perspective on Poverty and Health Inequalities in Lebanon, Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, 2003

 

ANNELIES MOORS

Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Amsterdam

Annelies Moors studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. From the early 1980s on, she has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Palestine (Nablus); later she also did fieldwork in Yemen (San‘a) and elsewhere in the Arab world. From 2001-2008 she was the Amsterdam University chair at ISIM (Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World).Currentlysheisprofessorofcontemporary Muslim societies at the University of Amsterdam where she directs the research programme on Muslim cultural politics at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Participants in this programme work on fashion, artistic performances, music, and mosque design; Muslim family law and everyday life; and the cultural politics of migrant domestic labor. She is currently writing a book about face-veiling in the Netherlands and beyond.

Research Projects: Marriages and Movements: Weddings and Wars

Selected Publications

  • Women, Property, and Islam: Palestinian Experiences 1920-1990, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • Guest editor of a special issue of Fashion Theory, on Muslim Fashions (with Emma Tarlo), 2007.
  • Moors, Annelies, 2011, Colonial traces?  The (post-)colonial governance of Islamic dress: gender and the public presence of Islam, in Maussen, Marcel, Veit Bader and Annelies Moors, eds., The colonial and post-colonial governance of Islam. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 135-155.
  • Moors, Annelies, 2011, '"Islamic Fashion" in Europe: Religious conviction, aesthetic style, and creative consumption', in Rafael Reyes-Ruiz, eds., Encounters: Engaging Otherness. London: I.B.Tauris. Pp. 187-213  (reprint of article in Encounters from 2009).
  • Moors, Annelies, 2009, ''The Dutch and the Face Veil: The Politics of Discomfort", Social Anthropology 17, 4: 392-407 (also translated in Spanish).
  • Moors, Annelies, 2009, "Weddings and war. Marriage arrangements and celebrations during two intifadas." JMEWS 5, 3: 11-34 (with Penny Johnson and Lamis Abu Nahleh)

 

Nadine Naber Image

NADINE NABER

Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Chicago

Nadine Naber is a Professor in Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She received her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Naber has authored and co-edited five books including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (Duke University Press, 2016); and Towards the Sun (Tadween Publishing-George Mason University, 2018). As a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003-2013), she co-founded the academic program, Arab and Muslim American Studies. In 2013, she relocated to the University of Illinois at Chicago where is the faculty founder of the Arab American Cultural Center. Today, Dr. Naber is developing a collaborative scholar-activist project, “Pedagogies of the Radical Mother” with members of the Black Youth Project 100 and the Arab American Action Network focusing on the impact of war and police violence on Black and Arab mothers while uplifting mother-based activism in Chicago and across the U.S.

Follow Professor Naber here.

First Research Project: The Transnational Circulation of Families in a Time of War: Lebanese Border Crossings Between Lebanon and Michigan

Second Research Project with Zeina Zaatari: Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon

Links: https://www.uic.edu/depts/wsweb/people/faculty/naber/naber.html

Selected Publications:

  • Articulating Arabness: Gender and Cultural Politics between Empire and Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, Series: Nation of Newcomers: Immigrant history as American History. 2012.

  • Arab and Arab American Feminisms: On Gender, violence, and Belonging. Edited with Rabab Abdulhadi and Evelyn Alsultany. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 2010.

  • Transnational Families Under Siege: Diasporic Engagements with the 2006 War on Lebanon, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. 5(2), 2009.

  • Race and Arab Americans Before and After September 11th: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, (Co-edited with Amaney Jamal). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 2007.

  • The Rules of Forced Engagement: Gendered Inscriptions of Terrorism on Arab Muslim Bodies, Journal of Cultural Dynamics. 18(3): 235-267, 2006.

  • Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/American(ized) Whore, Journal of Feminist Studies. 32(1): 87-111; Reprinted in Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press); Reprinted in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Forthcoming, Routledge), 2006.

  • Ambiguous Insiders, An Investigation of Arab American Invisibility, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies. 23(1): 37-61, 2000.

MARTINA_RIEKER.jpg

MARTINA RIEKER

Director, Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies The American University in Cairo

Martina Rieker is the Director of the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University in Cairo. Previously she served as the associate dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo. Before that, she served as associate director of the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies (AUC) during 2001-2005. She is co-coordinator of the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes in the Middle East and South Asia Network and co-coordinator of the (Re) Construction of War Torn Communities in the Middle East and Africa Working Group.

Research Project: Collecting Data, Constructing Desire: The Girl Child as Problem Space

Links: http://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/martinarieker

Selected Publications:

  • Rethinking Feminist Interventions Into the Urban. Edited by Linda Peake and Martina Rieker (Routledge, 2012).
  • Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia Edited by Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker (Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa Edited by Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
  • "Urban Margins: Envisioning the Contemporary Urban Global South." Special Issue Guest Editors: Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker. Social Text 26, no. 2 95 (2008).

 

ZEINA ZAATARI

Lecturer and Consultant, Women Gender, and Sexuality; Middle East and North Africa

Zeina Zaatari currently works as the Research Director at Political Research Associates. She continues to contribute to work on gender and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa, while also acting as the Associate Editor for Europe and Africa (northern and sub-saharan) for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Zeina’s most recent research focuses on Interrogating Heteronormativity in Lebanon: Family, Citizenship, and Access to Adulthood. Previously, she taught courses in Anthropology and Gender and Sexuality at several universities and worked as the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women (2004-2012) where she managed a diverse grantmaking program to support women’s movements. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from the University of California at Davis, with dissertation fieldwork focusing on women’s groups and activists in South Lebanon. She currently serves as Secretary of the Board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, is a core group member of the Arab Families Working Group ***, and is an elected Advisor for the MENA Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders ***. Additionally, she has authored several commissioned research publications including: “Unpacking Gender ***: The Humanitarian Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan” (2014, Women’s Refugee Commission). For more information see: https://independent.academia.edu/ZeinaZaatari

Selected Publications:

  • Social Movements and Revolution, In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altorki, pp. 338-360. UK: Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
  • “Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the “Anti-Modernity”: Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production” in Sexuality and Culture (2014)
  • “Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon” co-written with Nadine Naber in Journal Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power  (2014)
  • “Arab Feminist Awakening: Possibilities and Necessities” in Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective (in Arabic 2012, English 2014)
  • An edited book Telling Our Stories: Women’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (2011)
  • “In the Belly of the Beast: Struggling for Non-Violent Belonging” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2011)
  • “The Culture of Motherhood: An Avenue for Women’s Civil Participation” in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2006).