Events

Event details

Mizna is pleased to co-sponsor the presentation of Violence and the Shifting Politics of Knowledge Production in the Middle East, a two-day symposium taking place at the University of Minnesota featuring presentations on Palestinian liberation, gender, sexuality, and women’s rights solidarity activism, as well as poetry, music, and art.

This symposium will take place May 6–7 2024 at Walter Library, 117 Pleasant St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 and Regis Center for Art, 405 21st Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455 on the University of Minnesota campus.

This event is free and open to all UMN and non-UMN community members. Please register here.

Symposium Schedule

Monday, May 6 – Walter Library 402

9–9:15am: Opening remarks

9:15–9:30am: Welcome – Associate Dean Josephine Lee

9:30–11:30am: The Cunning of Gender Violence – Lila Abu-Lughod and Rema Hammami, moderated by Sima Shakhsari

11:45am–1:15pm: Violent Intimacies and the Trans Everyday in Turkey – Asli Zengin, moderated by Serra Hakyemez

1:15–2:15pm: Lunch break

2:15–3:45pm: Gender Ruptures: Zainab Saleh, moderated by Zozan Pehlivan

3:45–4pm: Closing remarks

Monday, May 6 – InFlux, Regis Center for Art

5–6:30pm: Reception

5–5:15pm: Artist introductions

5:15–5:30pm : Music – YallaDrum!

5:30–5:45pm: Poetry – Sana Wazwaz

5:45–6pm: Music – YallaDrum!

6–6:10pm: This is Not a Pomegranate – Katayoun Amjadi

Tuesday, May 7 – Walter Library 402

10–10:15am: Recap

10:15–11:45am: Genocide in Gaza and the Selective Plot of Women’s Rights Solidarity Activism – Minoo Moallem, moderated by Danielle Dadras

12–1:30pm: The Violence of Framing: Interpreting Israel/Palestine and Gaza Now and through the Holocaust – Chiara De Cesari, moderated by Sheer Ganor

1:30–2:30pm: Lunch break

2:30–4pm: A Sextarian World: The Geopolitics of Sex and Sexuality in the Transnational Middle East – Maya Mikdashi, moderated by Emina Bužinkić

4–4:30pm: Closing remarks – Leith Ghuloum, Mia Riza, Fatima Tufail

 

About the presenters

Katayoun Amjadi
Independent Artist and Art Instructor
Normandale College
Amjadi is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator, and independent curator. In her work, she often considers the sociopolitical systems that shape our perceptions of Self and Other, such as language, religion, gender, politics, and nationalist ideologies. Amjadi blurs these boundaries and creates an off-balance, hybrid style that is slightly acerbic and a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

Minoo Moallem
Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of Media Studies University of California, Berkeley
Moallem’s specialties are transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, religious nationalism and transnationalism, consumer culture, immigration and diaspora studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian films, and cultural politics. She is best known for her work on Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism as byproducts of colonial modernity and modernization of patriarchies. Her current research focuses on petroleum and gender.

Chiara De Cesari
Professor of Heritage, Memory, and Cultural Studies University of Amsterdam
De Cesari’s research explores how institutional manifestations of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics shift under conditions of contemporary globalization and transformations of the nation-state. Her research shows how Palestinian civil society has enrolled museums and urban regeneration initiatives to assert its distinct cultural heritage and reimagine future institutions amid the enduring Israeli occupation.

Maya Mikdashi
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers University
Mikdashi’s research explores the relationships between sovereignty, secularism, violence, sexual difference, religious pluralism, law, and the state in Lebanon. Her work suggests that producing, erupting, securitizing, and traversing the borders between the supposedly private and public spheres are key to understanding how secularism is operationalized, imagined, and desired in a world of nation states.

YallaDrum! Ensemble
New Arab American Theater Works program
Yalla Drum! teaches local community to play traditional Arabic percussion instruments in an ensemble environment, and provides an opportunity for the larger Twin Cities to interact with our rich traditions. These percussion instruments have existed for many centuries in South West Asia and North Africa, played by Muslims, Christians, Copts, Druze, Jews and Turks. YallaDrum! strives to pass these rich traditions onto future generations to strengthen solidarity among communities.

Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
Columbia University
Abu-Lughod’s work has focused on the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of women’s and human rights, global liberalism, and feminist governance of the Muslim world. Her current research focuses on museum politics in Palestine and other settler colonies, security discourses and Islamophobia, and religion in the global governance of gender violence.

Rema Hammami
Associate professor of Anthropology
Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University
Hammami is the founder of the University’s Right to Education Campaign and co-founder and former director of the Women’s Affairs Centre in Gaza Her current research focuses on the collusion between liberal peacebuilding/neo-humanitarian intervention within the logics of ongoing Israeli military occupation with an emphasis on how the aid industry deploys gender in techniques of rule across the West Bank and Gaza.

Asli Zengin
Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers University
Zengin’s research lies at the intersection of ethnography of trans, queer, sex worker and sex/gender transgressive lives; scientific and legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; death, funerals, cemeteries and afterlives; as well as transnational aspects of LGBTQ and feminist movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.

Zainab Saleh
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Haverford College
Saleh is interested in questions of empire and colonialism, belonging and subjectivity, migration and diaspora, and violence and knowledge production. Her research examines how formations of subjectivity, understandings of temporality, and the construction of a sense of home in a diasporic context have been situated in structures of power and in shifting terrains of class, political, gender, and religious sensibilities.

Sana Wazwaz
Poet, Activist, and Theater Artist
Wazwaz is a Palestinian-American writer, theater artist, organizer, and a graduating senior in creative writing at Augsburg University. She is the Chapter Lead of American Muslims for Palestine Minnesota and a member of New Arab American Theater Works’ Playwriting Program. Sana’ play, Birthright Palestine, was performed in a staged reading in April 2023 and her poetry has been published in Palestinian Youth Movement’s 2021 Ghassan Kanafani Anthology.

Co-sponsors

Imagine Fund, CLA Office of Faculty Affairs, CLA Office of Research & Graduate Programs, CLA Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Institute for Global Studies, Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Department of Asian and Middle East Studies, Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy, Sociology Department, AnthropologyDepartment, American Studies Department, History Department, Art Department, ICGC, Mizna, New Arab American Theater, and UMN Educators for Justice in Palestine