The event originally announced for March 2 featuring Dr. Simona Sharoni is being updated to include Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

Dr. Simona Sharoni and Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Monday, March 2, 2015
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Bond Memorial Hall
Swarthmore College (directions)

Dr.  Rabab Abdulhadi and Dr. Simona Sharoni met over twenty five years ago and have collaborated over the years on multiple scholarly and activist projects. Aside from sharing a life commitment to the struggle of peace with justice in Palestine and Israel, these two prominent feminist scholars have made contributions to other struggles for social, gender and sexual justice in the academy as well as at other international and North American sites.

Abdulhadi and Sharoni will offer such analyses including:

• The distorted dominant media coverage of the assault, which ignored the power disparities between Palestinians and Israel
• The racist and gendered images and statements deployed by Israeli officials and citizens to legitimize the violence.
• The impact of the violence on, and the responses of Palestinian and Israeli women
• The response of the international community with particular attention to the growing visibility and impact of the global movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), on one hand, and efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable and investigate possible violations of human rights and international conventions.
• Prospects for a just and lasting peace in the region in the aftermath of the Israeli war on Gaza and the earlier repressive campaign in the West Bank.

Dr. Simona Sharoni is a feminist scholar, researcher, and activist. She is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and her research includes a comparative analysis of gender dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the North of Ireland as well as a critical explanation of militarization and masculinities and especially the interplay between political violence and gander-based violence.

She is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance and was the founding Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and a founding member of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section at the International Studies Association. For more information about Dr. Sharoni: http://www.plattsburgh.edu/academics/gws/faculty/sharoni.php.

Rabab Abdulhadi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SFSU, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received her BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Special Honors Curriculum, Sociology and Women’s Studies from Hunter College in New York and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University.

A co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, she co-authored Mobilizing Democracy: Changing US Policy in the Middle East, and co-editor  Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 Evelyn Shakir National Arab American non-fiction Book Award, and a special issue of MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies special issue on gender, nation and belonging (2005).Her work has appeared in Al-Shabaka; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; Journal of Women’s History; Taiba: Women and Cultural Discourses; Cuadernos Metodologicos: Estudio de Casos; This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; and several Arabic language publications, such as Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah.

Abdulhadi taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Birzeit University in Palestine. The recipient of several honors and awards (including the New Century Scholarship, Sterling Fellowship, Phi Beta Kappa, and teaching excellence awards from Yale University and AUC), she serves on the Board of Policy Advisors of the Palestinian Think Tank, Al-Shabaka and the International Advisory Board of the World Congress of Middle East Studies (WOCMES). As a scholar/activist committed to justice-centered scholarship and pedagogy, she co-founded the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America (UPWA), the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), California Scholars for Academic Freedom and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She co-organized and led several delegations to Palestine made up of Indigenous scholars and scholars of color and has participated in academic, intellectual and public sites in the Global South and North, including World Social Forum in India, Brazil, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia.

The event is sponsored by War News Radio, J Street, SPJP, and the Peace and Conflict Studies Department.

For more information on the event, please contact Sabrina Merold (smerold1@swarthmore).