On International Women's Day: Women, Education and Empowerment in Palestine

On International Women's Day, this discussion examines the experience of women in higher education in the context of the current escalating military violence, dispossession and shrinking civil society space faced by the Palestinian people.

While considering a gender analysis of these phenomena, this panel also discusses the ways in which Palestinian women are collectively resisting their oppression.

Event co-sponsored with Friends of Birzeit University (FOBZU)

This event is in-person only. The talk and discussion will be followed by a reception.

About the Speakers

Speaker

Dr Rania Jawad, Assistant Professor, Director - Institute Of Women's Studies Birzeit University.

Dr Rania Jawad is assistant professor and current Director of the Institue of Women’s Studies. She writes on performance politics in Palestine, Arab theatre, and cultural politics in colonial contexts. Her book project “The Art of the Real” considers the violence of settler colonialism in relation to constructions of the “real” in Palestine.

Dr Samia Botmeh

Dr Samia Al-Botmeh is an assistant professor in economics at the Faculty of Business and Economics/ Birzeit University. She was the director for the Centre for Development Studies at Birzeit University till 2014. She worked with the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) in Ramallah as a researcher.

She has completed her PhD at the School of African and Oriental Studies- University of London, in labour economics. Areas of interest and publications are gender economics, labour economics, and political economy of development. She has engaged in research on alternatives to neo-liberal development in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and gender differentials in labour market outcomes.

Discussant 

Dr Rafeef Ziadah

Dr Ziadah is Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the Department of International Development (KCL). Her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. She holds a PhD in Politics from York University, Canada. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso press 2020).

Her research on infrastructures and maritime politics has appeared in Politics, Antipode; Conflict, Security & Development; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; among other venues. Rafeef has worked as researcher and campaigns organiser with a number of refugee rights and anti-poverty NGOs.