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>>HOW TO PARTICIPATE<<
In addition to the limited capacity Zoom webinar (RSVP required), this panel will be livestreamed on Facebook—share the livestream with your friends! Please note: a Facebook account is NOT required to watch the livestream.
>>ACCESSIBILITY<<
This event will be live-captioned in English, and the full webinar will be available for viewing post-event.

Following a statement made after the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, between July 10th and July 24th, 2020, Mizna with the US-based organizations including the Imagining Transnational Solidarities Research Circle at the University of Minnesota, and Arab Resource and Organizing Center will host a series of online panels in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Panels in Arabic, English, and Farsi are available. Read full statement here.

RSVP FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE PANEL

PANELISTS: Moustafa Bayoumi, Ramla Bile, Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, Lara Kiswani, Nadine Naber, Ash Stephens
MODERATORS: Sima Shakhsari, Farid Matuk

Meet the Moderators

A queer writer of mixed Syrian and Peruvian heritage, Farid Matuk has lived in the US since the age of six as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a naturalized citizen. He is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine) and The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press), and of several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry and in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, among others. Matuk’s poems and translations from Spanish appear in journals such as The Baffler, Gulf Coast, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, and Lana Turner Journal. His essays and interviews can be found in Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada, The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde, The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, Entropy, Bomb, and Cross-Cultural Poetics. Matuk serves as poetry editor at FENCE and on the editorial board for the book series Research in Creative Writing at Bloomsbury. His work has been supported, most recently, by residencies and grants from The Headlands Center for the Arts and The Lannan Foundation. Matuk’s book arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with Colombian visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.

Sima Shakhsari is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota, and a co-convener of the Imagining Transnational Solidarities Research Circle at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. They have authored many articles and a book titled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020), and are the anthropology, sociology, and gender studies book editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and an Editorial Collective member of the AGITATE! journal.

Meet the Panelists

Moustafa Bayoumi Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. A regular contributor to The Guardian, Bayoumi has also written for The New York Times , New York Magazine, The Nation, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other places. He is the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (O/R Books) and the co-editor (with Andrew Rubin) of The Edward Said Reader and The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966-2006 (Vintage). Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).

Ramla Bile serves as a program officer at a St. Paul-based foundation—bringing over ten years of experience as a strategist, social entrepreneur, and storyteller. As a community organizer, Ramla works to bring awareness to issues at the intersection of racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. A local leader in the Somali-Minnesotan community, she provided critical thought-leadership and advocacy against the Countering Violent Extremism program, and continues to challenge the surveillance apparatus and the ways that systems institutionalize the criminalization of BIPOC communities. A published author, she supports communities impacted by state violence by promoting greater understanding, resilience, and liberation through her writing. She co-founded and writes for Ubuntu: the Collective, a platform that spotlights emergent issues impacting the global Black diaspora.

Lara Kiswani is from Beit Iksa and Aqir, Palestine, and was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been active in movements against war, Palestinian self-determination, and Third World solidarity movements for the last 20 years. She is a lecturer at San Francisco State University in the College of Ethnic Studies, and the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC).

 

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is a human rights lawyer who has a decade of experience working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations in the US, France, DR Congo, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Federal Republic of Nigeria and many others. Her work focuses on building international and national policies for the most vulnerable populations around the world. She has led the release and reintegration of children associated to armed groups/forces, incarcerated children as well as survivors of sexual violence. In her other life, Priscillia born in France from a Congolese father and Iranian mother, is a writer, documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Collective for Black Iranians, a chapter-based not-for-profit organization with the mission to represent Black and ‘Afro-Iranians’ voices within the Iranian diaspora, educate on the connections between Africanness/Blackness and Iranianeness as well as advocate for Black joy within the Iranian diaspora at large. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School and NYU Law (JD/Masters/LL.M).

Dr. Nadine Naber is an award-winning author, public speaker and activist on the topics of racial justice; gender justice; women of color feminisms; Arab and Muslim feminisms; Arab Americans; and radical mothering. She is the author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism; Race and Arab Americans; and co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (Duke University Press, 2016); and Towards the Sun (Tadween Publishing/George Mason University, 2018). Dr. Naber began putting love and social justice into practice in the 1990s when she co-founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association North America. She has also served on the boards of organizations like the Women of Color Resource Center; INCITE!; the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy; and the Social Justice Initiative at UIC. As a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arborr, Dr. Naber co-founded the academic program, Arab and Muslim American Studies. In 2013, she moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago as a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies. At UIC, she is the faculty founder of the first center on a college campus serving the needs of Arab American students in the US: The Arab American Cultural Center. She will soon be the interim director of UIC’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.