Existence is Resistance: A Performance by Palestinian Drag Queen Madam Tayoush

Existence is Resistance: Palestinian Drag Queen Madam Tayoush

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2018,  7 – 9PM
SCHEUER ROOM

Elias Portrait
Photograph by Joni Sternbach

Download a flyer here: Madam Tayoush Poster

Performance Artist Elias Wakeem, also known as Madam Tayoush, is a queer Arab Palestinian artist living and working in Palestine. Through performance they/she examines the reaction of the audience to their/her personal story of the place they/she grew up in with its geographical, historical and political situations. Madam Tayoush has created a series of monthly radical queer drag ball parties in Jerusalem called “Jerusalem is Burning”.

Sponsored by Peace & Conflict Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Sociology & Anthropology, the Lang Center, and the Sager Fund.

The Sager Fund of Swarthmore College was established in 1988 by alumnus Richard Sager ’74, a leader in San Diego’s gay community.
The fund sponsors Events focused on concerns of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities.

Open to the public.

Migration Stories: A Reading and Conversation – Mikhail Shishkin

Peace and Conflict Studies is proud to cosponsor:

Migration Stories: A Reading and Conversation with Mikhail Shishkin

Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 4:30-6 p.m.

McCabe Library Atrium

Refreshments provided

Free copies of Maidenhair will be available for students!

 After working as an interpreter for Russian-speaking refugees seeking asylum at the Swiss border, emigre-dissident Mikhail Shishkin incorporated this experience into his novel Maidenhair. The stories he presents offer a more human(e) perspective that encourages empathy, that transcends statistics by delving deep into the stories of the displaced, and that emphasizes the power of storytelling as a means of preservation. Join us for a reading and discussion with one of Russia’s best living writers as we consider how art can help us understand the global refugee crisis. In addition to his reading, Shishkin, who is the only writer to have won all three of Russia’s top literary prizes, will speak about his work in Switzerland and take questions from the audience for a wide-ranging discussion.

Facebook event page

Shishkin Event FlyerFor more information, please contact José Vergara (jvergar1@swarthmore.edu).

Co-sponsored by the President’s Office Andrew W. Mellon Grant, the Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility, the Intercultural Center, Swarthmore Libraries, Russian Studies, German Studies, Peace & Conflict Studies, the History Department, and the Bryn Mawr Russian Department.

The World that Created Boko Haram: Gender and the Islamic Revolution in Northern Nigeria

Thursday, April 26, 2018 at 4:30 PM — Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

The World that Created Boko Haram: Gender and the Islamic Revolution in Northern Nigeria


Starting in 1999, twelve northern Nigerian states began the process of reimplementing full shari’ia penal codes in response to massive grassroots demand. A few years later, the process was widely considered a failure and attention was turned to battling the ascendancy of Boko Haram. In 2002, a peasant woman named Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity. A year later she was acquitted before attentive eyes worldwide. This lecture examines the historical and cultural factors at work in the call to reimplement sharia penal codes in Northern Nigeria, examines the stoning punishment in the Islamic tradition, and analyzes the questions of gender and the western reaction to Amina Lawal’s case.

Eltantawi Event Poster

Dr. Sarah Eltantawi is a scholar of Islam. She is Member of the Faculty in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA (Associate Professor), and a Research Scholar at the Middle East Center of the University of Washington . She earned her PhD in the Study of Religion in 2012 from Harvard University, where she was the Jennifer W. Oppenheimer Fellow and Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has academic fellowships at Brandeis University, UC Berkeley, and at the Forum Transregionalle at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin as well as the Freie Universität in Berlin. She obtained an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and a BA in Rhetoric and English literature from UC Berkeley.


Her recently released book Sharia on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California, 2017), examines why Northern Nigerians took to the streets starting in 1999 to demand the reimplimentation sharia law. She uses the stoning punishment and the trial of Amina Lawal for committing adultery as her primary lens of inquiry.

Dr. Eltantawi is currently at work on a new book that takes up the rise of the of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from 1928 – the present, focusing on the question of the group’s “political theology” and its place in traditions of political theory. Dr. Eltantawi has also published on issues ranging from early Shi’ite jurisprudence to perceptions of “post-modernity” in Nigeria to the revolution in Egypt.

She is also a political analyst, writer, and radio show host. Before taking up scholarship she had a career as policy and communications director of two American Muslim civil rights organizations in Los Angeles, Washington DC and New York City. She has been published in the New York Times, Reuters, Newsweek and more, and has appeared on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and is a regular news commentator for Al Jazeera English. From 2011-2015 she published a regular column in Die Tageszeitung, Germany’s fourth largest newspaper, and she hosts the radio show Contemporary Islam Considered for Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of the Los Angeles Times Review of Books. She has also been selected for the 2016-2018 speaker’s bureau of Humanities Washington, a National Endowment of the Humanities sponsored public program dedicated to sparking conversation and critical thinking in the state of Washington.

This event is open to the public.

Sponsored by Peace & Conflict Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Islamic Studies, the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility, and the Department of Sociology & Anthropology.