Join Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of International Studies, Anthropology, and Middle East Studies at Brown University, in discussing how struggles over bodies, gender, and sexuality are central to contemporary politics in the Middle East. 

Against a brief historical backdrop, Nadje Al-Ali examines recent protest movements and wider struggles for change. She traces how gendered forms of mobilization - on the streets, online, and in intimate spaces - both challenge and are shaped by authoritarianism, militarism, and sectarianism.  Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in relation to Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and the Kurdish movement, Al-Ali discusses gendered mobilization as a crucial lens for assessing governance, social transformations and visions for justice and peace. Al-Ali also reflects on the politics of knowledge production: how can scholars write about gender-based violence and resistance in the Middle East without reproducing culturalist exceptionalism or erasing local forms of violence and contestation? The talk makes the case for feminist scholarship as indispensable to understanding the region's current crises and futures.