CMES Colloquium Spring 2023
Hosted by Marcia Inhorn
Rhoda Kanaaneh has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at a number of universities including NYU, Columbia, and Fordham. She has held fellowships at Harvard and the European University Institute. She is the author of several books including the award winning Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (University of California, 2002) and Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military (Stanford, 2009). This talk draws from her latest book on Arab asylum seekers in the United States.
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Hosted by Elizabeth Berk
Lea Bou Khater is a lecturer in development studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is a former post-doctoral fellow affiliated to the Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies department at AUB. She earned her PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London in 2017. As a development practitioner, she has authored various reports pertaining to labour issues in Lebanon. Her research interests are state-labor relations and social protection with a focus on migrant workers in the GCC countries.
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Daniella Farah (PhD Stanford University, 2021) is a postdoctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. As a historian of the Jews of the modern Middle East and North Africa, her research focuses on Jewish-Muslim relations, national belonging, and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries Iran and Turkey. Her current book project, Integrating Iranian Jews: Education, the Press, and National Belonging in Modern Iran, explores how the intersection of education, the press, and nationalism enabled Jews in twentieth-century Iran to make claims of belonging to the nation.
Rania Sweis’ research centers on critical medical anthropology, global health and medical humanitarianism, transnational feminist theory, and the Middle East and North Africa region. Her first book, Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2021), won the 2022 Best Book Award from the Association of Middle East Childhood and Youth Studies, and traces the experiences of vulnerable children in Egypt who receive global medical assistance. She is currently working on a book project that extends questions of medical aid in the Middle East to focus on medical humanitarianism in the Syrian Civil War. Dr. Sweis’s research has garnered awards from the Social Science Research Council, the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society. Her articles have appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Childhood, The International Journal for Middle East Studies, and The Journal for Middle Eastern Women’s Studies. In addition, she has published numerous op-eds about politics and healthcare in the popular press.
Natasha Iskander is the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. Her research focuses on immigration and the ways that the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and new pathways for political change. She has looked at these questions in multiple contexts, including Mexico, Morocco, the United States, France, Qatar, and South Asia. She is the author of two award-wining books and 40 additional publications looking at immigration, skill, economic development, infrastructure, and worker rights. This talk is taken from her second book, Does Skill Make Us Human? Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021).