Since the number of MA and PhD students from North Africa and the Middle East is growing, TNT has invited Dr Nadia Jones-Gailani to run a workshop on how she has designed courses on Feminism and Islam and on the broader context of from where the ideas come, and why these are part of a broader feminist discourse. The workshop will be held on December 7, 2018, from 2 p.m. in Room 3 of the Institute of English and American Studies.
Who’s Afraid of Islamic Feminism? Teaching at the Intersections of Faith and Feminism
The presentation will outline attempts at constructing and deconstructing Islamic feminism as a site of analysis and practice applicable to the lives of Muslim women. This talk opens from the premise of teaching at the intersections of faith and feminism from within a liberal academic framework. Using personal and collected narratives, the presentation will explore what it means as a hybrid woman of colour within the Academy to introduce two perceived antithetical concepts – Islamic faith practices and feminist theory – as a classroom forum to debate feminist practice. The talk gives a brief introduction to the basic premises that are explored in Jones-Gailani’s MA course on Islamic feminism: can there be a feminism grounded in Islam, and in what ways are there specifically ‘Islamic’ forms of feminist practice? The workshop will facilitate a discussion with the participants on why prompting the question of an ‘Islamic feminism’ reveals the multiple meanings that this convergence holds for Islam and feminism, two intellectual paradigms that impact the lives of Muslim women.
Nadia Jones-Gailani is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and History at Central European University in Budapest. Having graduated in 2013, she took up a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of History at the University of South Florida (2013-2016). She recently submitted her first book manuscript for publication with the University of Toronto Press. The book explores the memories and identities of Iraqi women refugees who have resettled in Jordan, Canada and the U.S. over the past three decades. With a new focus on Muslim feminism(s) and women’s political subjectivity in the Modern Arab World, her research interests focus on individual life histories and what these can tell us about women’s day-to-day experiences of war, loss, and displacement.
TNT is honoured and happy to host Dr. Andrea Zittlau from the American Studies Department, University of Rostock, Germany. Andrea is a scholar, a poet, and a performance artist, who is going to run a Workshop for our students interested in Gender Studies, entitled The Language for the Dis/possessed.