Transnational Feminist Solidarities: A Conversation

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Middle Eastern Studies Program

present

Transnational Feminist Solidarities: A Conversation

In this conversation with Professor Sunera Thobani (University of British Columbia), SU Middle Eastern Studies Program faculty members Carol Fadda, Amy Kallander, and Dana Olwan will discuss the politics of transnational feminist solidarities that connect struggles beyond fixed geographic borders and academic disciplines. Focusing on movements for liberation and justice across the US, Canada, and the Middle East and North Africa, members of the SU community are invited to join this conversation about the meaning, implications, and challenges of engaged feminist praxis in a time of heightened militarism and rising anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism. 

Speaker Bios:

Sunera Thobani

Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship focuses on critical race, postcolonial and transnational feminist theory; intersectionality and social movements; colonialism, indigeneity and racial violence; globalization, citizenship and migration; representations of Islam and Muslims in South Asian and Western media; and Muslim Women, Islamophobia and the war on terror. Dr. Thobani is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada, (2007) and the co-editor of Asian Women: Interconnections, (2005) and States of Race: Critical Race Feminist Theory for the 21^stCentury, (2010).  Her research is also published in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Borderlands, Atlantis, Feminist Theory, The Supreme Court Review, International Journal of Communication, Hypatia and Race & Class.  

Carol W.N. Fadda

Carol W.N. Fadda is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University, where she teaches on critical race and ethnic studies, transnational and diasporic studies, and Arab American literatures and cultures. A recipient of an NEH summer grant and a Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, her essays on gender, race, ethnicity, war trauma, and transnational citizenship in Arab and Arab American literary texts have appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. She is the author of Contemporary Arab American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Home and Belonging (NYU Press, 2014), which analyzes the ways in which depictions of Arab homelands in Arab American literary and cultural texts from the 1990s onwards play a crucial role in reshaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. Her current book project is titled Carceral States and Dissident Citizenships: Narratives of Resistance in an Age of “Terror.” She serves as the editor of the Critical Arab American Studies book series at Syracuse University Press.

Amy Kallander

Amy Kallader is Associate Professor of Middle East History and affiliated faculty with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department. Her first book Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia, offers a social history of women and the ruling family in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and her current project ‘Our Revolution’: Tunisian Women in the Global 1960s examines the interactions between postcolonial state feminism, transnational women’s movements, women in development in Tunisia and the Middle East in relation to the global cultural and political movements of the 1960s.

Dana M. Olwan

Dana M. Olwan is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University.  Her research is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gendered and sexual violence and solidarities across settler borders and states.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly and Feminist Formations. She is completing her first book manuscript, Traveling Discourses: Gendered Violence and the Transnational Politics of the ‘Honor Crime.’  

Sponsored by Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Middle Eastern Studies Program, International Relations Program, Department of Women's & Gender Studies, South Asia Center, and Department of Political Science.   

Contact Havva Karakas-Keles for more information: hkarakas@syr.edu