Sara Ababneh

Sara Ababneh

Sara Ababneh is Assistant Professor at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies. She is the Refugee Studies Diploma and CSS Internship program coordinator. Ababneh earned her DPhil in Politics and International Relations from the St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2010. She wrote her dissertation on female Islamists in Hamas in occupied Palestine and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan. Ababneh has conducted research on Mandate Palestine, gender and Islamism, Muslim family laws, and labor movements. Her research interests include class, gender and struggles for liberation and change. Currently, Ababneh studies the popular Jordanian protest movement (al-Hirak al-Sha‘bi al-Urduni). She has recently published a piece on women in the Jordanian Day Wage Labor program in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Ababneh was selected as the Carnegie Centennial Fellow at the Middle East Institute at the University of Columbia in the fall semester 2016. 

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Mimi Abramovitz

Mimi Abramovitz

Mimi Abramovitz is Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. She has published widely on issues related to women, poverty, human rights and the U.S Welfare State. Professor Abramovitz is currently writing a book on the history of low-income women’s activism in the U.S. Her previous books include the award-winning Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the U.S., Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present, The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy and Taxes Are A Woman’s Issue: Reframing the Debate. She has also published more than 80 articles in scholarly and popular journals. Among her honors and awards, Dr. Abramovitz has been inducted into the Columbia University School of Social Work Hall of Fame.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Anthony Acciavatti

Anthony Acciavatti (Yale University) is the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture. He works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology. He is interested in experimental forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and design afforded by humanistic inquiry. His most recent book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (Applied Research); Design, 2015), is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. He spent a decade hiking, driving, and boating across the Ganges to map it and to understand the historical conflicts over water for drinking, agriculture, and industry. Combining fieldwork with archival research, the book is an atlas of the enterprise to transform the Ganges into the most hyper-engineered landscape in the world. In 2016, the book was awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Hülya Adak

Hülya Adak

Hülya Adak is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Sabancı University. She has published essays on Ottoman-Turkish memoirs and biographies, national myths, gender and sexuality, and the Armenian deportations during World War I in leading journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, PMLA, Biography, and New Perspectives on Turkey. Her most notable publications include “National Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk and Halide Edib’s Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal” and “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies.” She is the co-author of so ist das, meine schöne… (Orlanda Verlag), a feminist book with monologues based on interviews exploring women’s sexuality, and the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Modern Turkish Cultural History through Auto/biographies (Unions Verlag). She is currently writing a book on archival memory of World War I and collective mourning in Ottoman-Turkish autobiographical narratives and literature. 

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Rebecca Adami

Rebecca Adami

Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London

Dr. Rebecca Adami, PhD is currently Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). Former Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College as well as at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University.

Her post doc project titled “Women of the Declaration: Exploring Counternarratives on Human Rights from 1946-48” centers on the UN female delegates who where part of drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Her research interest is on the broad study of human rights in the field of philosophy of education. In her PhD thesis, titled “Human Rights Learning: the Significance of Narratives, Relationality and Uniqueness”, Dr Adami explored human rights learning through a narrative turn that focus on learners and teachers life stories, drawing on the work of Hanna Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. Her published work includes articles such as “Re-Thinking Relations in Human Rights Education: The Politics of Narratives.” in Journal of Philosophy of Education and “Towards Cosmopolitan Ethics in Teacher Education: An Ontological Dimension of Learning Human Rights”, in Ethics and Education. Dr Adami has taught university courses for teacher students on multiculturalism and diversity at the Department of Education, Stockholm University.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Neera Adarkar

Neera Adarkar is a practicing architect and an urban researcher. After her graduation in architecture from Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai University, Neera completed her post-graduation in Industrial Design from I.I.T. Powai, Mumbai. Currently she is a visiting faculty member in the Academy of Architecture, Rachana Sansad in Mumbai.

Neera's concern in social, urban and gender issues has resulted in her associations with various civil society organizations in Mumbai. She is a founder member and trustee of Majlis, a NGO engaged in cultural and urban projects. She is closely linked with the Textile Workers' Union in the city of Mumbai. Her involvement in the urban struggles as an activist led her to participate in the process of formation of Mumbai Peoples' Action Committee, a coalition of citizens' groups active on various urban issues.

She is one of the founder members of Women Architects Forum which in the early nineties initiated the women architects to revisit their own profession and the built environment at large with a gender perspective. As part of the team of Adarkar Associates, Neera has designed private and public projects in and out of Mumbai.

She has co authored with Meena Menon One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices, Oral History of Millworkers of Girangaon (2004) and edited a volume: The Chawls of Mumbai; Galleries of Life (2011).

She has many published articles to her credit and has presented papers in conferences and delivered talks on urban, cultural, architectural, heritage and gender issues in India and outside India in the Universities and Conferences in New York, Chicago, Berkeley, Cornell, Leuven.

Fariba Adelkhah

Senior Research Fellow, Institut d'Études Politiques (Sciences Po), Paris

Fariba Adelkhah is Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po in Paris. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, 1989).  An anthropologist, her main research interests focus on the relationships and interplay between social changes and political transformations throughout the second half of the 20th century in Iran. She has written a number of books on Islam and Iran, and her current research deals with the Iranian Diaspora.  She is member of the editorial boards of Iranian Studies and Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée. Her research focuses on political anthropology of Iranian society. See her publications.

Faith Adiele

Professor Adiele teaches in the creative writing programs at California College of the Arts (San Francisco, Calif., USA) and Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program (Portland, Maine, USA). Her writing classes focus on decolonial travel writing and hybrid (multiracial/multigenre) memoir; her literature courses specialize in contemporary African literature, the literature of intersectional passing, and international Young Adult (YA) literature and film.

Her memoir Meeting Faith, an account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun (Norton 2004), received the PEN Open Book Award and is widely taught in American universities. She is also writer of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about finding her family in Nigeria, author of The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a tri-cultural digital chapbook about black women and fibroids, and co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology.

Professor Adiele founded the USA’s first writing workshop for travelers of color through the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, writes a weekly travel column for Detour: Best Stories in Black Travel, which appears in the Miami Herald, and is senior editor of Decolonising Travel in UK-based journal Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. She also hosts an African Book Club at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora and produces Africana content for the Calm meditation app.

She is currently at work on the USA’s first decolonial travel craft book (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) and several hybrid chapbooks about her Nigerian-Nordic-American heritage (forthcoming from Texas Review Press).

Dina Afrianty

Dina Afrianty

Research and Lecturer, Social and Political Sciences, State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta

Dina is an Endeavor Post-doctoral fellow at Melbourne Law School University of Melbourne. Dina earned her PhD also from the University of Melbourne writing a thesis on the work of Local Women’s NGOs in Reforming Islamic Law introduced in 1999 in the Province of Aceh. Dina’s research interests include women’s rights, women’s movement, Islamic education, international development, and legal reform in Muslim societies. Dina has done research in Islamic Education in Indonesia and was the team leader for a research on Islamic education in Indonesia project supported by the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, Boston University in 2004-2006. Dina has published articles and book chapters on the issue of education and on women’s movement in Aceh. Dina was a research assistant for the Encyclopedia for Women and Islamic Studies (EWIC), published by E.J. Brills from 2003 to 2006. She was responsible for assisting the routing editor for East Asia, South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific region. Dina recently joins the Asia Foundation working for NGO capacity strengthening to provide poor women and children better access to legal rights under the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice Project.

Flavia Agnes

Flavia Agnes

Lawyer

Flavia Agnes is a women's rights lawyer and writer and has been actively involved in the women's movement for the last two decades. She has written extensively on issues of domestic violence, feminist jurisprudence and minority rights. Her books are widely acclaimed and are popular among advocates, paralegal workers, law students and women who have been victims of domestic violence. Currently she co-ordinates the legal centre of MAJLIS and is also engaged in her doctoral research on Property Rights of Married Women with the National Law School of India.

Meltem Ahıska

Meltem Ahıska

Professor of Sociology, Boğaziçi University

Areas of Interest: Orientalism, social memory, gender

Education:

Ph.D., Goldsmiths College (2000)       
B.A., Boğaziçi University (1980)    
    
Selected Publications:
“Occidentalism and Registers of Truth: Politics of Archives in Turkey”, New Perspectives on Turkey, 34, 2006, Special Issue on Social Memory, eds. M.Ahıska, B.Kırlı.

"Aradığınız Kişiye Şu An Ulaşılamıyor": Türkiye'de Hayat Tarzı Temsilleri, 1980-2005 (with Zafer Yenal ), Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, Istanbul, 2006.

“Hayal Edilemeyen Toplum: Türkiye’de “Çevresiz Merkez” ve Garbiyatçılık", Toplum ve Bilim, 105, 2006.

Hikayemi Dinler Misin? Tanıklıklarla Türkiye’de İnsan Hakları ve Sivil Toplum (edited with Zafer Yenal), Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, Istanbul, 2004

Biography:

Meltem Ahıska is Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University. She has written and edited a number of books among which Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting (2010) is the most recent. Her articles and essays on Occidentalism, social memory, national identity, and gender have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. She has been in the editorial collectives of Akıntıya Karşı, Zemin, Defter, Pazartesi journals. She is a member of the editorial board of the e-journal Red Thread.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Attiya Ahmad

Attiya Ahmad

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, George Washington University

Dr. Attiya Ahmad is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the George Washington University (Washington DC, USA). Broadly conceived, her research focuses on the interrelation between gender, labour migration, diasporic formations, cosmopolitanism, and Islamic movements crosscutting the Arab Gulf States and South Asia.  Dr. Ahmad is also developing a project focusing on halal tourism networks spanning the Arab Gulf States, the United Kingdom and Turkey.  Her work has appeared in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and edited volumes focusing on labour migration, diaspora, and religion in South Asia and the Gulf Arab States.  She is currently revising her book manuscript, which focuses on the Islamic conversions of South Asian migrant domestic workers in Kuwait.  She obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University.

Gazi Nafis Ahmed

Gazi Nafis Ahmed

Gazi Nafis Ahmed is an artist working with photography and video. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he studied art and design at London Guildhall University, United Kingdom. He received his B.A. from Danish School of Media and Journalism in Denmark and his M.A. in fine arts photography from Istituto Europeo di Design Madrid in Spain, both on full scholarship. Ahmed was awarded at the international Pride Photo Award 2015 in Amsterdam for his series “Inner Face.” In 2013, he received the Blub Award from Format International Photography Festival in the United Kingdom. He attended a yearlong artist residency program from 2018 to 2019 that was supported by The Andrew W Mellon Foundation. In 2019, he represented the Bangladesh Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 58 th . His work has been exhibited in worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts and EMK Centre in Dhaka. In 2016 Ahmed had solo exhibition at BRAC University, which was organized by BLAST and James P. Grant School of Public health. His photos have graced the pages of Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. His critically acclaimed series “Inner Face” and “Innate Identities” explores gender performativity.

Working Group Affiliation

Reframing Gendered Violence

Nadje Al-Ali

Nadje Al-Ali

Professor, Gender Studies, SOAS University of London

Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies (CGS), SOAS University of London. She is currently chair of CGS and head of the Doctoral School at SOAS. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism; transnational migration and diaspora moblization; war, conflict and peace; as well as art & cultural studies; mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books); New Approaches to Migration (ed., Routledge, 2002, with Khalid Koser); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. Her most recent research and publications focus on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Kurdish women’s movement.

Professor Al-Ali was President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) from 2009-2011. She is also a member of the Feminist Review Collective, and is on the editorial board of Kohl: a Journal of Body and Gender Research. She was involved in several projects with Iraqi academics and women’s rights activists which facilitated the introduction of women and gender studies and increased evidence-based research capacity in Iraq.

Working Group Affiliation
Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Wafa Al-Khadra

Wafa Al-Khadra

Wafa Al-Khadra is a university professor and experienced university administrator, currently serving as Dean of Faculty of Languages and Communication at the American University of Madaba. She has extensive experience in gender studies, strategic planning, quality assurance, and discourse analysis. Wafa a is a frequent speaker, seminar leader and consultant on gender studies and feminist theories at several national, regional and international organizations. She is devoted to feminist politics and gives unstinting support to women's/ human rights. Wafa has contributed to the academization of feminist thought, gender studies and to the analysis of school textbooks. Her research interest is in the two areas of politics of identity and gender studies.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Nissreen Haram

 Nissreen Haram holds a B.A. in economics from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and an M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University in Montreal. She has had a diverse career as a Trade Policy Advisor, Law Firm Director, Children’s Museum Director, and Artisan Cheese maker. She has also been member of the Yale Law School Middle East Seminar, and its organizing committee for more than 15 years. She is actively interested in Islamic legal and intellectual history, and contemporary approaches to religious reform.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Alex Aleinikoff

Alex Aleinikoff

Prof. Aleinikoff is University Professor and has served as Director of the Zolberg Institute since January 2017. He has written widely in the areas of immigration and refugee law and policy, transnational law, citizenship, race, and constitutional law. His most recent book (co-authored with Leah Zamore) is The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime. Previously, he held the position of United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees (2010-15) and was a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where he also served as dean and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University. He received a J.D. from the Yale Law School and a B.A. from Swarthmore College and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts of Sciences in 2014.

Working Group: Refugee Cities

Zahra Ali

Zahra Ali

Zahra Ali is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers, Newark. Her research explores women and gender issues in relation to Islam and the Middle East, as well as contemporary Muslim communities and Islamisms. Her recent research explores contemporary Iraqi women’s activism through an in-depth ethnography of post-2003 Iraqi women’s political groups conducted in Baghdad, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah and a study of women’s social, economic and political experiences since the formation of the Iraqi state. Her book Women and Gender in Iraq: between Nation-building and Fragmentation will be published by Cambridge University Press in Spring 2018. She also edited Féminismes Islamiques, the first collection on Muslim feminist scholarship published in France (La Fabrique editions, 2012), translated and published in German (Passagen Verlag, 2014).

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Susan Alshammari

Ayşe Gül Altınay

Ayşe Gül Altınay

Professor of Anthropology, Sabancı University

Ayşe Gül Altınay is the Director of SU Gender and Associate Professor of Anthropology teaching in the Gender Studies and Cultural Studies Programs at Sabancı University. Among the programs she coordinates at SU Gender are “Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul” and “Transformative Activism: Rethinking Gender and Politics.” She has published widely on militarism, memory, violence, gender and sexuality. Her books include Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (co-edited with Andrea Petö, 2016); The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of “Lost” Armenians in Turkey (with Fethiye Çetin, trans. Maureen Freely, 2014), and The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education in Turkey (2004). Since 2013, she has been a part of the Women Mobilizing Memory Working Group of Women Creating Change and is one of the co-editors of Women Mobilizing Memory (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2019).

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory