 Gweld, mae'n gwneud hynny'n fawr yn ymweld ystafell yn y ffynghordd, a'n ddweud. Yn Pwyll Webbli, rhai'r drefwysau, rhai'r ddweud i gael ei wneud i'r awdŷ yn y ddweud. Yn amser, mi'n gweithio allan yn y gweithio ar y ddeunydd a'r profesor Nadia Allali's I remember the people we met and the families we grew up with and that is for me. Her friends and colleagues and her family are here, her mother a father, husband and daughter and I also now know that there are friends who have traveled all the way from Germany who are at primary school with her. So a particular welcome to you wherever you are. I was also told by Nadja that you were going to try and make her laugh and can I tell you that's not acceptable. That is a deeply serious occasion and you can of course try and make her laugh if you like. Ond o'r cyfnodd, sydd wedi gweld ymlaen o'r cyfnod, yma'n gilydd o'r cysylltu unigol o'r cyfnodd, sy'n addysg, sy'n amlwg o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd, oherwydd mae'n bwysig i'r cyfrannu, a o blomwyd yn unigol, mae'n gwneud o'n amlwg o'r cyfnodd, mae'n ddefnyddio'n gilydd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd. ac o unig yw hwyl sy'n fawr hyn ymddangos gyda'r ffawr yn ymddangos ar gyfer y ffodol ymlaen chi. Ar hyn mae'n dda i ddim yn ddim yn dweud. Felly mae'n rhaid o'n ddweud o'r ffordd ar y dyfodol. A luiwch ddweud o'r ddaethau o'r rhwng. Mae'r ffordd yn ddiwedd i'r ffaithau i'r ysgol ar y cyfrifio. Felly mae'n ddim wedi cyrraedd o ffaithau. Fy oes i ni ddweud o'r ffaithau o'r ffaithau. i mi ni i ddweud i wneud eu llei yn yma oedd yn adrolygiad. Rwy'n gweithi'n ffordd o fewn i'i gweithio eu llei yn awgryl, sy'n 5 o 4 o gweithio i'r awgryl, sy'n ddigwydd i gwybodaeth ystod o'r hynny. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweld Naga sydd wedi bod yn ysgolwyd ymlaen, i fi'n gofyn hwn o ddiwasiwn o'r contextol. a she is always forthright, she is a person of great integrity, she is a superb scholar who wants her work to have impact and she is a very warm individual. I am looking forward to being enlightened on the relevance of gender as an analytical category. But I am also particularly interested in her explorations of the tensions between academic and activist trajectories because I think those are of interest to lots of people here at SIS. Naidw will be introduced by Professor Denise Candiyoti, who is very well known to people here at SOWAS. Like me, Professor Candiyoti was educated in the Social Psychology Department at the London School of Economics, but she has had a much more interesting career than me. Doing work first on political economy, rural transformation, then gender nationalism in Islam. From 1969 to 1980 Denise worked at Istanbul Technical University, and Bokatsi CSAP, I can't pronounce it, University in Turkey, then she moved to England and she came to SOWAS, I think I've got this right in 1992, she's now an emeritus professor at SOWAS, but still deeply involved in the Development Studies Department. Denise has been a stalwart of SOWAS, she's been key to the development of our expertise in central Asia, she's played a very important role and continues to play an important role in developing the next generation of scholars, not least by supervising Naidw's PhD thesis. At the end, the voter thanks will be given by Cynthia Coburn, who's a feminist researcher and writer, working at the intersection of gender studies and peace conflict studies. Cynthia is visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London, an honorary professor in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick. She's written a vast amount, her most recent publications are From Where We Stand, War, Women's Activism and Feminist Analysis and The Line, Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus. It's very active in the international anti-militarist network Women in Black. We're very grateful to both of you, both Cynthia and Denise, for being part of today's event. That's my bit over. I'll pass on to Denise to introduce Professor Al-Ali over to you, Denise. Dear friends, colleagues, family, former students, current students, welcome to all of you. When 17 years ago Nadia Al-Ali walked into my office at SOAS to start our PhD, she quietly placed an American University of Cairo publication on my desk. This, to my utter surprise, was her MA dissertation. What followed broke with the pattern of endless vacillations and false starts that we commonly associate with the process of dissertation writing. Nadia had decided to study the women's movement in Egypt, not just as a scholar seeking a new field of inquiry, but someone who was already a participant in it. During her student years in Cairo, Nadia had developed an insider's knowledge of her field by being a participant observer, not in the watered down version that we sometimes encounter in textbooks on ethnographic methods, but in its most robust form by being a rank and file member of an organisation. Furthermore, at a period when research on Muslim women's movements and subjectivities in the Middle East generally and more particularly in Egypt was in the process of becoming a cottage industry, Nadia had opted to look at the full spectrum of secular women's activism, setting these movements in their historical context, and in the process providing an important window on Egyptian political culture more generally. Her first book, Secularism and Gender and the State in the Middle East, published by Cambridge University Press, has become and remains a classic in this field. The ingredients that were to become the hallmarks of her scholarship, the integration of analysis and activism, and the courage to refuse any simplifications of complex issues at the risk of falling foul of orthodoxies on the left and right were already present at the very start of her career. When Nadia finished her PhD in 1998, she left SOAS, but SOAS had already given her far more than a degree. This is where she met her partner Mark over, I believe, some serious but extremely fortuitous computer problems. And some years later, little Alina joined the family adored by her parents, grandparents and all their friends alike. Between 1998 and 2000, Nadia worked on an ESRC-funded project at the University of Sussex, which gave her the opportunity to branch out into the fields of migration, diasporas and refugees. Not only did she manage to inject a gender perspective into this comparative project, which broadened her horizons, by the way, by taking her to field work in Bosnia and work in Europe among Bosnian and Eritrean refugees. But she also found a way of connecting with Iraq in her academic work through the study of Iraqi diasporas. This was the fulfillment of a wish that had grown ever stronger since she made contact with her Baghdadi family in 1997 at the height of the sanctions regime against Saddam Hussein. Throughout her years at Exeter University, which she joined as a lecturer in 2000 and where she started an MA degree on gender and identity, Nadia continued her work of advocacy and research on Iraq. This culminated in her book, Iraqi Women Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, published in 2007, a text that moves deftly from deeply touching personal anecdote to historical narrative and from humor to sadness. It is at that point, I remember, that I asked Nadia whether she considered being a creative writer. And this is because I had not expected a page turner when I picked up that book, but I found that this was exactly what it turned out to be. So there is something, I think, in this for all of us academic writers. There is little doubt that working in and on Iraq was Nadia's own journey of self-discovery, a journey that we're about to hear of in greater detail, which was deeply formative of both her academic and political persona. The book she co-authored with Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation, Women and the Occupation of Iraq, published in 2009, which turns a forensic lens on the policies following the occupation of Iraq, especially on the hollow and self-saring rhetoric of women's liberation, bears testimony to the academic facet of her political engagement, an engagement that has manifested itself over the years through multiple media, including visual arts and different forms of advocacy and solidarity work. When Nadia joined SOAS in 2007 as director of the Center of Gender Studies, this was a joyful homecoming for all who knew her here. The center had been created two years earlier through the efforts and dedication of colleagues like Rachel Harrison and Amina Yakin, who I hope are with us today. Nadia's capabilities as a manager and institution builder came fully into their own when she took on the task of developing the programs and profile of the center. It now has a well-established MA degree and a rapidly expanding PhD program that officially started in 2008-9, and I'm very gratified to see among us the products of this program. However, Nadia did more than establish degrees. She created a vibrant community. With its small staff and dedicated students, the center manages to project its influence well beyond SOAS. It participated in the creation of the Bloomsbury Gender Network with Birkbeck UCL and the Institute of Education, which provides a forum for colleagues working on gender issues in the Bloomsbury colleges and hosts extremely exciting events. Nadia also missed no opportunity of putting the center on the map, accepting, among other things, to serve as the first non-US based president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women's Studies, AMEWS. She made it her personal brief to reach out to scholars from the region. This is a mission she tried to accomplish in many different ways, not least through the fellowship program for female refugee academics run through the center with the assistance of CARA, the Council for the Assistance of Academic Refugees, and also by participating in projects and programs you will tell us more about to help enhance the research and teaching potential of Iraqi academics. I very much doubt that there is any instrument designed to assess academic achievement that can ever capture the labor of love involved in acting as a catalyst and facilitator in weaving networks of solidarity and exchange with colleagues in the Middle East, especially those threatened with persecution and marginalization. Nadia gave unstintingly the days and weeks spent in patient work, quiet diplomacy, organization and travel to bring together colleagues across borders and goes on doing so, reminding us all of what responsible academic work ought to be about. We have entered a period when the politics of gender and the question of women's rights have become entangled with geopolitical concerns as never before. It will take a great deal of energy and dedication to keep an unwavering focus on issues of equality and rights. And I am totally confident that Nadia will be there to rise to this challenge. I end following Nadia's travel metaphor by saying that I feel deeply privileged to have been a travelling companion in the early stages of her career and a constant witness to her later development. As academic rites of passage go, few pleasures can compare to the deep feeling of gratification that I feel as I hand over the floor to her now. Thanks so much, Denise. Very, very moved by your very generous words. And I really came to SOAS in 1994 because of Denise. And I'm so pleased that now we are able to work together here at SOAS. I mean, I know you're officially retired, but you're still working, especially in the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies. Thanks so much. Also my thanks to Paul, who might not always agree on everything. But I very much feel that Paul is so serious and committed to SOAS. And I really, really appreciate it. And I'm very happy to work with you here. And later on, you will hear from Cynthia, Professor Cynthia Coburn, my dear friend and colleague, who was actually, when I was a PhD student here at SOAS, I was renting a room in a house. And I learned lots of things from Cynthia. But one of the things that is really very sort of important for me is that Cynthia taught me that we can strive to translate theoretical and political ideas into everyday life practices and interactions. I would also like to thank you all, colleagues, students, friends, family, strangers to be here. And I'm very happy that you're here to share this moment with me. I'd like to particularly thank my parents who came from Germany yesterday. They, of course, already called me Professor when I was 10 years old. But I think it was more in the derogatory term of someone in the clouds. So I hope that I managed to kind of find a more grounded reality, so I'm trying anyway. And yes, again, thanks to my friends Nina and Eva, who came from Germany just for this occasion. I'm going to be trying very hard not to look at them. In our sort of school paths, we're known for giggle during lectures, so I don't want to go there. Also, of course, thanks to my partner Mark and our daughter Elena. Both of them had to be my patient audience as I was trying to rehearse this talk. And, well, I should say that Elena's gestures made it very clear what she was thinking of it. So I hope she's not going to do it tonight as well. I'm also grateful to Payal for organizing the event today. And finally, I would like to thank my two photographer friends, Eugenie Dahlberg and Samah Ashaibi. I'm going to show images and to Eugenie has gave me permission to show images from the Open Shutter's Iraq project. And Samah Ashaibi, I'm going to show some of her self-portraits. You will notice when you see them. The other images are partly from my own collection and some have been in the public domain. So, on not travelling lightly, transnational feminist journeys to and from the Middle East. It has almost been impossible over the last few months to keep up with the political developments in the Middle East. Small scale demonstrations and mass protests, revolutionary processes that not only involve the political sphere, but that have also touched the social fabric. The ousting of several dictatorial regimes. The brutal crackdown and killing of peaceful protesters. Arm struggle and debates about international intervention. Not to forget the various forms of counter-revolutionary backlash. In the initial phase of these rapid changes and developments, I was frequently asked, where are the women? The first images we saw of protest in Tunisia and Egypt were largely of men. It soon became obvious though that women were involved at all levels. For decades, there had been active members in trade unions, political opposition parties and more informal networks and organisations that had all been instrumental in the recent political developments. Women have been very much involved in the virtual communities of bloggers and Facebook users. And during the height of the actual protest to oust Ben Ali and Mubarak, women of all generations and social classes were on the streets in large numbers. Notably in places like Tahir Square in Cairo, where men and women mingled over weeks in extremely crowded and volatile situations, many Egyptian women reported that they had never felt as safe and had been treated as respectfully as during the time of these protests. Without doubt, it has been easier for women to participate in politics in Egypt, where the protest movement has taken an explicitly non-violent character, Sylmia, and where there exists a long history of large-scale women's political participation. Indeed, in Egypt and also in Iran, which to my mind should not be left out in current discussions about people's power and resistance, women activists have been spearheading civic rights, democracy and human rights movements in the context of their women's rights struggles. My own work on the Egyptian women's movement in the mid-90s revealed that women's rights activists were engaged in contestations with the state about the shaping of gender policies, as well as wider issues of citizenship and social justice. To varying degrees, Egyptian women have engaged for a long time in grassroots activism and have aspired to find non-hierarchical ways of organising, thereby engaging in the process of democratisation. Yet, even in the more socially conservative countries like Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Syria, and they are all very different from each other, we find that women have increasingly pushed the boundaries of what is socially acceptable when joining the protests and making their own gender-specific demands. In addition to joining in the wider calls for reforms, democratisation and anti-corruption, political transparency and human rights. It is not surprising that revolutionary processes should open up social and political spaces for women. History is full of comparable examples across the world. If we speak of the Middle East, the most commonly cited examples are the Egyptian anti-colonial and independence movement at the turn of the 20th century that gave rise to the Egyptian women's movement, the Algerian War of Independence in the time of French colonialism and the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. Yet, history also teaches us that during political transitions, women are regularly being marginalised and tend to lose many of the gains that might have acquired or have been promised at the height of a revolutionary struggle. We see this development most clearly in the Egyptian context, but the institutionalisation of the various aspects of the protest movement and political representation has not only been male-dominated, but has also been controlled by the military. Here, the issue is not only the lack or the very limited representation of women in crucial transitional bodies, such as the constitutional review committee. But maybe more significantly, we see women's rights being actively violated and women's and gender-based issues sidelined, occasionally even ridiculed, sometimes by women themselves. Unfortunately, but again not surprisingly, we can see that women and gender issues are taking centre stage in the old regime's attempt to hold on to power and privilege and in the violent backlash and counter-revolutionary processes we have been witnessing recently. Egyptian women who participated in demonstrations during International Women's Day on the 8th of March this year were being harassed and being accused of taking away attention from the main issues. Some men who attacked the female protesters claimed that they were seeking to destroy Egypt and undermine family values and the sanctity of the family by telling women to desert their husbands. In this instance, it was obvious that the men surrounding them were divided into those feeling threatened by women's bloc, making their own demands and thereby challenging the prevailing gender order and men standing in solidarity with them, recognising that the women's demands were at the core of their own visions and ideas of a new Egypt. The treatment of female protesters has taken on very different forms to that of their male counterparts. When it comes to women, roughing up and brutalisation by the police, the muchabarad and the secret police, and the army often has sexual connotations. Egyptian female protesters have been strip-searched, the pictures have been taken while without close, they have been accused of prostitution and in some cases even forced to undergo virginity testing. Yemen's president Ali Abdullah Saleh suggested last month that anti-government protesters in the capital Sana were in violation of Islamic law because women were not allowed to mix with men. He engaged in smear campaigns on national TV implying that women in pro-change demonstrations were loose women. The heart-wrenching case of Iman al-Obedi, a Libyan woman from Benghazi, who was raped by a group of military men loyal to Gaddafi, was a cruel reminder of the way rape becomes a commonly used weapon in warfare. Rape here is not only meant to violate and hurt an individual, but it becomes a way to humiliate and violate an entire community. What made this case so different from the many others that go unreported is that Iman al-Obedi did not let herself be silenced by prevailing notions of shame and codes of honour. She went public, and as you probably all know, the international media circulated the images of her anguish and terror widely. For me personally, most shocking in the scenes we saw broadcasted around the world were the Libyan women working in the hotel who tried to silence Iman calling her a traitor and at some point throwing a coat over her face. Those images made crystal clear what we have known for many years, but is still painful to watch and experience in practice. Sisterhood is not global. It might not even be local. Women are not necessarily in solidarity with each other just because they are women. Theoretically and politically, several other issues emerge from these recent events. The centrality of women and gender when it comes to constructing and controlling communities. Might there be ethnic, religious or political? The significance of the state in reproducing, maintaining and challenging prevailing gender regimes. Ideologies, discourses and relations. The instrumentalization of women's bodies and sexualities in regulating and controlling citizens and members of communities. The prevalence of gender-based violence. The historically and cross-culturally predominant construction of women as second-class citizens. The relationship between militarization and a militarized masculinity that privileges authoritarianism, social hierarchies and tries to marginalize and control not only women but also men who by virtue of their class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or politics do not fit into the image of the normative ideal men. The backlash against women in some current context also reminds us that women's reliance on the state to champion and support gender equality and social justice is problematic. It has already become obvious and I've seen it most clearly in the context of post-invasion developments in Iraq. Politicians and governments in the region have been prone to compromise women's rights in order to show up support among socially conservative constituencies. In Iraq for example, the central as well as Kurdish regional government have been sidelining gender-related issues in the context of negotiating political disputes such as federalism, the regulation of oil and the status of Kirkuk. When dealing with the dictatorship and the one-party system, it becomes very difficult for women's rights activists to operate independently outside given state structures. Yet authoritarian regimes may implement measures to increase gender equality and social justice as long as these are perceived to be harmless to the regime and the status quo. We have seen it in the past most conspicuously in Tunisia and Iraq. An exaggerated belief in the ability of the state and the main political party to promote women's rights might seriously diminish women activists' credibility and might limit their strategies and possible achievements in the long run. The various theoretical and political issues emerging in relation to recent processes and events in the Middle East illustrate what many of us have been narrating, documenting and analysing over the past decades but what often remains misunderstood. A gendered lens is not just about women, although in some contexts that continues to be an important and necessary focus of inquiry as women are still systematically absent from official accounts, analysis and projected future scenarios. Yet in zooming in to what happens to and is going on with feminities, masculinities and sexualities, to gender norms, ideologies and discourses, as well as gender roles and relations, and the various processes of gendering within all aspects of social, cultural, political and economic lives, tells us a lot about the nature of and dynamics within the state, citizenship, civil society, the military, the economy, etc. When Cynthia Enlow famously and provocatively asked a few years ago whether gender might be the bigger picture, what she alluded to is that when we have a gendered lens, we learn about power, both of the more oppressive top-down variety but also the more subtle micro-politics of power. We learn about hierarchies and inequalities. And a gendered lens also allows us to explore the various ways subjects are materially and discursively constituted and circumscribed, both at local and global levels. This brings me to one of my personal commitments as an academic and as an activist, namely to challenge the now all-too-frequent depolitisation of gender studies within Western academia and the related gender mainstreaming within national and international institutions. Following in the footsteps, and I should add, digital pathways of a long line of intellectual and political predecessors, contemporary mentors and inspiring scholars and activists, my past and current work falls not only within the multidisciplinary field of gender studies, but, and here I finally mentioned the F-word, it is also feminist. The relationship between the women's rights movement or what we refer to as a second wave of feminism in the mid-20th century and the emergence of women and gender studies has been widely documented in Western countries. Less attention has been paid to the emergence of this academic discipline in global contexts, which unfortunately is frequently reduced to westernisation and globalization. Yet a close local reels that wherever women or gender studies have emerged as academic disciplines, local and transnational feminist activism has paved the way for academic engagements with women and gender issues. The Middle East as a region is a case in point. Women's rights activists working either within political and social movements, always in the context of civil society associations like trade unions, NGOs, professional organisations and cultural groups have struggled for decades to address gender-based inequalities. In Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, Jordan and Morocco for example, universities have proven to be far more conservative and reluctant in institutional contexts to address previously taboo questions than some aspects of civil society. While women and gender studies are starting to become acceptable in some countries in the region, feminism paradoxically is widely viewed with suspicion. Of course this is not only true for the Middle East but also in the West with the stereotype of the man-hating radical feminist whole sway. Yet feminism for me as for many thousands of women and some men across the globe is based on the recognition of and struggle against inequalities and lack of social justice based on gender as well as intersecting inequalities and injustices. Feminism is an analytical tool with which one can study societies, explore complex social, cultural, political and economic phenomena and pay attention to changes, transformations and contestations. For example, feminist theories and concepts provide me with analytical tools to discuss the potentially devastating impact of the British government's cuts on welfare provisions and the education sector, particularly on women and people of black and ethnic minority background. But feminist theories and concepts have also enabled me to study the impacts of war and occupation on Iraqi women and men and the way political transition and reconstruction are gendered. In my previous work on the modern history of Iraqi women, I have analyzed the various ways in which both historically and in the current context women's dress codes, their mobility, comportment and sexuality are central to constructing identities and communities, especially in situations of conflict and political transition. More recently I have also started to explore the ways Iraqi men and masculinities have been affected by years of dictatorship, economic sanctions, militarization, the invasion, sectarian killings and tensions and the ongoing occupation. Yet my own work on Iraq and the research I've done jointly with my friend and colleague Nicola Pratt also shed light on changing state policies and political economies in Iraq, the nature and impact of regional and international policies and interventions. The drastic changes in Iraqi society were suspect to class and sectarian identities and tensions and the failures of post-invasion Iraqi governments and politicians. By providing analytical tools, feminism refers to social and political movement that tries to address the inequalities and injustices that seem to pervade our lives. It gives birth to political practices which differ depending on specific interpretation and political leaning. Personally I associate my political practices as a feminist with the struggle against racism, imperialism, economic exploitation and heteronormativity and the attempt to find non-hierarchical and non-violent ways of resisting these various forms of intersecting hierarchies and inequalities. What has been coined transnational feminist politics and praxis. There's a game my daughter Alena loves to play in cars, restaurants and any odd place that requires sitting down and waiting. The game is about memorising the various bits and bobs that we would put into a suitcase if you were to travel anywhere. I was reminded of that game and reflecting on the kind of baggage that I, just like many of my transnational feminist friends and colleagues carry around. Amongst the bits that weigh sometimes heavily on me while also giving the metaphorical, even if certainly not angelical wings, to struggle on are an understanding of and an occasional personal experiences with patriarchal practices and structures deeply rooted in material realities and discursive configurations. Experiences with and recognition of colonial, neocolonial and imperialist structures and policies. An aversion to generalized and essentialised notions of women or men and the dichotomy such notions entail. An acknowledgement of differences within the category gender along multiple intersecting axes. The most commonly cited being class, ethnicity, race, sexuality and disability. A disillusionment with an identity politics that simultaneously constructs collectivities on the basis of privileging a specific aspect of difference by glossing over and marginalising other aspects of diversity. A painful sense of complicity with many of the structures and practices that give rise to and reproduce social inequalities. On the specific context of travels to and from the Middle East, I need to add to my already bursting suitcase further contents. The colonial legacy and the contemporary neocolonial fallacy that uses women to construct difference and to champion women's liberation as a justifying factor for military interventions. Obsessions with cultural authenticity and traditions in which culture becomes more rigidly constructed than it was in the past. Accusations that local and transnational feminists are traitors who imitate the West and religious fundamentalists of any religious background who use women's bodies and sexualities to assert control and power. But I'm also weighed down heavily by the so-called war on terror. Tales of and possibly self-fulfilling prophecies about civilisations clashing, Islamophobia and racism. A long list. Just like in the game that Elena likes to play, I need to keep track of the various bits, but I also need to consider the genealogies and the tensions that generate. I don't do travelling lightly. Mark, my favourite travel partner, knows this only too well and it's not only metaphorical. Now let me take a few minutes to share with you some of the major milestones and crossroads of my personal journey. My own entry into feminist activism and scholarship started in Egypt in the early 90s when a post-graduate student in anthropology at the American University in Cairo. And this is an image of the late Professor Cynthia Nelson, who was a great mentor at the time. Several Palestinian and Egyptian friends introduced me to a Cairo-based women's rights organisation that worked with female students and factory workers and was challenging the restrictive policies of the Mubarak regime regarding civil society associations. The experiences with a specific group triggered my interest into women's rights activism and feminism more broadly and this in turn led to my PhD on the Egyptian women's movement. I was particularly interested in analysing the meaning of secularism in the context of Egyptian women's rights activism at a time when much of the existing literature was concerned with women and Islam. While I associate my time in Cairo with the beginning of my feminist scholarship and activism, it is my family connections as well as political developments in Iraq that have very much shaped the focus of my academic and activist work over the past decade. I was going to say decades, but it's decade. I had visited my family in Baghdad regularly as a child and teenager and continued to do so if less frequently when I started university. My father had left Iraq in 1958, long before the bath of Saddam Hussein came to power. He travelled in order to study in Germany and only ended up staying after marrying my German mother. So unlike most of my friends and the Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers I got to know over the years who were not able to go back as long as Saddam Hussein was still in power, we were able to go and see our relatives every so often during holidays. On one of my trips to Iraq in July and August of 1990, my father and I were trapped on the way out because of the invasion of Kuwait. During the Gulf War of 1991, I left Cairo where I was studying at the time to be with my family in Germany. Most days and nights we spent anxiously watching the news which often looked more like video games than coverage of a war zone. One day my mother and I convinced my father by then extremely anxious and worried about our relatives in Baghdad to come to town with us. We wanted to distract him. But when we sat down in a café the news was blasting in the background and some old lady shouted they should just kill them all. I still cringe thinking about it. It was not until 1997 that I returned to Baghdad at a time when economic sanctions had already left an ugly mark on society. The visit to Baghdad was a turning point in my personal, professional and political life. As so many other second generation Iraqis living abroad, it was increasing recognition of the human suffering inside Iraq, triggered by political repression, wars and economic sanctions that pushed me to a closer relationship with the country my father had left almost five decades before. I was humbled by my relatives who did not show any sense of envy of my ability to come and go, spending my holidays visiting them in Baghdad but then being able to leave the country while they had to stay behind. Nor did I sense any resentment of my privileges and freedoms having been able to travel to many places and having obtained an education in different countries. Instead I felt that my cousins, at least those closest to me in age, appeared to be curious about my life and to my great astonishment, genuinely happy for me. It was during that trip in 1997 when I saw how the country's infrastructure had deteriorated beyond belief due to sanctions in addition to the ongoing political repression by the Bas regime that I promised myself to use my freedom, my education and my skills more purposefully. I wanted to increase public consciousness not only about what had been happening to Iraqi women but also to Iraqi society at large. During the late 90s I found a political home and safe space with women in black London, part of a worldwide network of women campaigning against war and violence and for peace with justice. I am greatly indebted to the numerous women who have long years of experience in women's rights and peace activism and whose analysis and politics was devoid of easy slogans and polemics. I was also involved in the British-based anti-sanctions movement but often felt uncomfortable with a frequently apologetic tone when it came to the regime of Saddam Hussein. Many of my Iraqi friends shared the frustration and even anger with some of the anti-sanctions groups and individual activists who in the process of condemning British and American policies on Iraq, particularly the sanctions regime, often glorified the Bas regime and dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Trying to articulate a more nuanced political position while also bringing together British and Iraqi activists, a group of like-minded Iraqi and British women established an organization in 2000. Initially we called it Act Together Women Against Sanctions on Iraq. We spent the first couple of years trying to educate people in Britain and other Western countries about the devastating impact of economic sanctions on the Iraqi population, but particularly focusing on the impact on women in terms of both the humanitarian crisis but also more restrictive gender norms. Aside from the most obvious and devastating effects of sanctions related to dramatically increased child mortality rates, widespread malnutrition, deteriorating healthcare and general infrastructure, as well as unprecedented poverty and an economic crisis, women were particularly hit by changing political and social climate. State discourse and policies, as well as social attitudes and gender ideologies shifted dramatically during the sanctions period. In late 2001 we widened our focus and started to campaign against the British and American invasion of Iraq. From the beginning we made it clear that we opposed both the repressive bath regime and American and British policies on Iraq. In March 2003 we mounted an exhibition called Our Life in Pieces, Objects and Stories from Iraqis in Exile at the Deirama Gallery in Central London. Our main motivation at the time was to dispel the idea that Iraq could be equated with Saddam Hussein. Before 2003 hardly anyone ever talked about Iraq in terms of ordinary human beings, their fears, hopes and aspirations. We issued an invitation to Iraqis in exile to contribute objects which held a particular meaning for them. Repositories of personal, familial and social memory and history, emblems, talismans, anything they wanted to exhibit which had some connection with Iraq. Initially women seemed more willing to contribute objects and write their personal accounts than men who often said they hadn't brought anything with them. We also had to work hard to gain people's trust. The painful recent history of the country had left many Iraqis wary. Once this barrier was crossed however they became intrigued and enthusiastic and up to the opening of the exhibition people were still contacting us, wanting to bring in their objects and stories. In the end we had about 75 exhibits. The opening of the exhibition in March 2003 coincided with invasion of Iraq. The exhibition became a gathering point for many Iraqis who feared for their relatives and friends' lives. We felt incredibly helpless, sad and angry but we also knew that we were making a very small contribution to reminding people in Britain that the military intervention was affecting real people on the ground as well as people living in the diaspora. Since 2003 our group now renamed Act Together Women's Action for Iraq has tried to raise consciousness about the specific issues and problems facing Iraqi women which include humanitarian issues, gender-based violence and increased social conservatism. We have been joining Iraqi-based women's organisations and campaigning around the constitution and wider legal issues, particularly with respect to the personal status law. We have also been trying to lobby British politicians whose commitment to women's empowerment did not last very long. And most crucially we have been striving to remind people in this country and other western contexts that although the media has not been covering Iraq extensively anymore the war is not over, especially not for women who are experiencing a multitude of challenges and are exposed to many different sources of violence. But women have also been openly opposing sectarian and political violence and have been at the forefront of recent protest movements against corruption and the lack of rule of law. It is not only within humanitarian and welfare associations human and women's rights activism as well as the wider movement for civil rights and democracy that Iraqi women have played a very active role despite the many obstacles. Iraqi women are also strikingly present within the higher education system. However, and I should stress, wearing my UCU equality and diversity hat here, not unlike western contexts including British academia, we find that women tend to be frequently excluded from permanent, senior and management positions and decision-making processes. The trend is similar to what we are struggling against at Sowas and other academic institutions in this country. Only the situation is far more extreme and daunting in Iraq. Aside from an unreconstructed and in many ways newly flourishing sexism, Iraqi higher education has been experiencing a crisis that is difficult to grasp when compared to the kind of problems we are facing in this country and I'm not suggesting that they are not significant here. The crisis of Iraqi higher education itself needs to be put in the context of the crisis and devastation faced by Iraqi society more widely. In addition to the damaging effects of decades of a ruthless dictatorship, we should remember the 13 years of sanctions that left a terrible mark on Iraqi society. Academics were denied access to new books, academic journals and magazines and were prevented from international collaborations and travels. Thousands of university professors left the country seeking employment or at least refuge abroad. Those who stayed behind were struggling with extreme conditions inside the universities as well as students who had to focus on supplementing their family incomes rather than being able to concentrate on their studies. The UNDP report of 2000 shows that women's employment rate fell from being the highest in the region estimated to be above 23% prior to 1991 to only 10% in 1997. These figures only represent formal wage labour and do not include the informal sector in which women were very active throughout the sanctions period. Monthly salaries in the public sector which since the Iran-Iraq war had increasingly been stuffed by women dropped dramatically and did not keep pace with high inflation rates and the cost of living. The shift towards social conservatism and greater restrictions on women's mobility and labour force participation was even more radical after the invasion. Yet the role of female academics has been significant after 2003. Many senior academics have had to flee the country faced with targeted assassinations and constant threats so adding to the brain drain of previous decades. This has resulted in a situation where about 30% to 40% of Iraq's most highly trained educators are thought to have immigrated since 1990. Of the remaining teaching staff only 28% have a doctorate. The rules require educators to have a master's degree, yet one third have only a bachelor's degree. Following the Ministry of Higher Education degree in 2005 to offer employment for all MA and PhD holders, many female postgraduate students were given posts as lecturers or researchers. In 2005 about 44% of all academic staff was female, including BA and MA holders who were teaching. This is a conspiracy. Although the ministry's decision has been widely perceived as positive, the policy has actually led to hidden unemployment as many young female academics were not actually given proper tasks and rules. Many female academics of the younger generation like training in other teaching or research methods. At the same time, female academics of the older generation often feel marginalised or at odds with the younger academics who might perceive the older generation as remnants of the previous regime. All generations of female academics are frequently excluded from decision-making processes and posts in a context where academia continues to be extremely politicised and vulnerable to corruption, as is currently the case with many aspects of Iraqi society. While membership in the higher echelons of the BA was generally a requirement for senior positions during the old regime, in contemporary Iraq each university is controlled by a different political party and militia, which tend to be linked with sectarian agendas. In 2007 I've had the privilege of working with the Council for the Assistance of Academic Refugees, or CARA, who, since the 1930s, have been championing academic refugees in Britain, as well as academic freedom more widely. With respect to Iraq, CARA's initial focus has been on the large number of refugee academics who arrived in the UK after the wave of assassinations started in 2004. Here at the SOA Centre for Gender Studies, we, with the help of CARA, started a fellowship programme for female refugee academics. Although the fellowship is open to refugee academics from any country, given the large-scale exodus of Iraqis, most of the female academics we have hosted so far are of Iraqi origin. CARA's soon recognised that the number of Iraqi refugee academics in the UK represented only the tip of the iceberg as hundreds of academics were stranded in Jordan and Syria. A few years ago, the organisation started to work on several mentoring and career development schemes within the Middle East, eventually expanding its remit to work with Iraqi academics inside Iraq as well. CARA's more recent Iraq fellowship programme aims to enhance regional, and Iraqi research and teaching capacities and to nurture lasting international research collaborations. As part of this programme, I'm currently working with a team of Iraqi female academics, two based at the University of Baghdad and one refugee academic in Amman, to explore the crisis in Iraqi higher education through a gendered lens. Our research focus on the different roles, challenges and problems of Iraqi female academics. The main objective is to document the specific social, cultural, political and economic challenges female academics face within the current context, while also analysing relevant historical factors that have contributed to the current situation. While recognising that the roles and problems of female academics need to be looked at in light of the wider crisis and challenges of Iraqi higher education, our research aims to disentangle gender specific issues. And look at the possible intersections of gender, generation, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation and social class in relation to appointments, job descriptions, actual tasks, training, access to resources, facilities and enumeration. In our sample, we have included female academics who have fled Iraq post-2003, especially those based in Amman and London, as many are hoping to return to Iraq once the security situation and general living conditions have stabilised. At the same time, our research aims to assess gaps and needs in terms of qualifications, teaching and research skills, administrative and organisational abilities, as well as resources. In addition to providing an analysis of the current situation of female academics, we aspire to draw up a concrete list of suggestions to contribute to skill development and capacity building. I've just started to replicate this project with a team of female academics from Iraqi Kurdistan, based at Saladin University in Abil. The British Council-funded project also aims to develop the first women and gender studies course at an Iraqi Kurdish university. The broader aim of facilitating women and gender studies was in Iraq in terms of both capacity building but also regional and international networking is also at the heart of KARA's project aims. To that end, we have co-organised a workshop in December where we invited academics working in gender issues from Egypt, Turkey, Palestine and Lebanon to meet with a group of Iraqi academics and activists. We are planning to follow up on the positive outcomes of the first workshop and to expand the existing network to include more regional and Iraqi participants. What I've presented as straightforward and rather linear pathway has in reality been much more complex and riddled with hurdles, fierce gatekeepers and at times apparently unbridgeable passages. Thanks to that same heavy baggage I described to you earlier. Negotiating a transnational feminist politics that challenges gender inequalities in the context of war and conflict has been fraught with difficulties. One of the main tensions and challenges that I'm constantly confronted with is that of lobbying for and advocating women's rights and social justice while struggling against Islamophobia and racism. I'm sure that there are many others in the room who are familiar with the tightrope walk that strives not to fall into the trap of either becoming an apologist for discriminatory and oppressive practices in the name of fighting Islamophobia and racism or becoming a mousepiece of imperialist feminists and neoconservative politicians who advocate women's liberation in the Middle East. There's a good reason many of us feel compelled to overemphasise local women's agency in order to challenge western views of Middle Eastern women as powerless and oppressed victims. But this representation can underestimate the weight of structural oppression women experience. Presenting issues, struggles and perseverance from local women's perspectives and not losing sight of the power of the state, cultural and societal institutions is a difficult balancing act. Another major challenge relates to the political need for common ground while recognising difference and refusing essentialist positions. A fault line almost inevitably opens up for anyone simultaneously committed to a politics of resistance, liberation and independence and a rejection of essentialist notions of culture, identity and the subject of emancipation. This divide cannot be easily bridged and probably continues to be one of the greatest challenges for transnational feminist thinkers and activists today. I'd like to share a further political dilemma which is that of rescuing the positive dimensions of gender mainstreaming in fora like the United Nations without succumbing to technographic jargon that leaves intact neoliberal and new conservative policies, military interventions and militarized peace processes. Gender mainstreaming and UN resolutions like 1325 on women, peace and security as currently interpreted and practised by transnational and international actors largely failed to address the causes of war and occupation which include US empire building, global energy demands, the strategic security interests of the West, the competition for political power and aspirations for nation statehood. Indeed, neoliberal and new conservative interpretations of gender mainstreaming as part of conflict resolution and peace building may really serve to deflect attention away from the political, economic and military interests that fuel the continuation of conflict. In addition, foreign attention to gender issues in the context of occupation may simply fuel a backlash against women's rights and I'm always hesitant to show this picture. I mean, this is a picture that was more recently taken in Iraq and this has nothing to do with Iraqi tradition. In both scenarios, the promotion of gender mainstreaming by international donors might contribute to hardening perceptions of national and religious divisions and conflict situations as Nicola Pratt and my work on Iraq has shown. But despite all these shortcomings we can't afford to just give up on these official instruments and tools and need to work with them, but in a reflective and critical manner reminding official bodies and individuals of the transformative agenda and spirit linked to the concept gender. I'm keen not to reproduce a dichotomy of theoretical versus political. As I do see theory, politics and praxis closely intertwined and constitutive of each other. However, it would be disingenuous to not mention that activism and academia do each carry their own set of rules, requirements and trials and that these are not always in harmony with each other. These include the extra research emphasis and focus, the methods of research, what and where to publish, in which context and how to engage with the public, particularly in terms of language, emphasis and tone. I certainly feel much freer now to chose accessible language over jargon than in my earlier years of being a scholar when I felt more compelled to prove that I was credible as an academic. Yet whatever audience and context I feel strongly committed to a nuanced discussion that refuses simple polemic positions. Finally, what has been accompanying me on the way and is frequently forcing me to stop and reflect are the dilemmas and tensions revolving around peace, militarism and violence. Feminists as well as anti-war activists are divided on the issue of military interventions for the sake of women's rights and human rights more generally, but are also divided about the means of resisting empire, neocolonialism and the widespread neoliberal economic onslaught we are witnessing globally. It has been painful to be accused of being preoccupation in some context as I refuse to indiscriminately support armed resistance in Iraq at a time when hundreds of innocent civilians were being killed in marketplaces outside mosques and just walking on the street. It is not only in Iraq that I see a relationship between militarism, authoritarianism and gender-based violence. Following the recent events in Egypt I was surprised by some of my Egyptian friends trust in and initial optimism where the democratic commitment of the military was concerned. Yet given that the revolutionary processes and large-scale protests in Egypt were not only led by civilians but also explicitly non-violent unless confronted with direct violence by the police or the army I'm much more confident and optimistic about the long-term prospects for more radical democratic change there rather than in places subject to the regime change plus elections model that tends to leave intact old hierarchical and corrupt political structures and inequalities. I'm much more hopeful for the future of women's rights in Tunisia and Egypt than in Libya where the struggle mainly takes place amongst men with arms. Closer to home a commitment to non-violence extend to the kind of direct political action we decide to engage in. Non-violent resistance is concerned not only with content but also with process the way we do things the quality of relationships we aspire to with and beyond a group. History not only in the Middle East but also in Western context is full of examples of supposedly progressive political movements and institutions with prevailing authoritarian political cultures that value a certain type of masculinist leadership and that masculinist leader does not necessarily have to be a man. The main challenge here is to find non-hierarchical inclusive and sharing ways of decision making and communication. So I've just thrown in another bulky bit into my luggage but I'm not complaining. I find the idea of travelling empty-handed far more daunting. Thank you. At least I have light, that's wonderful. First I'd like to thank you Nadia and congratulate you too on this thoughtful lecture. Autobiographical but at the same time analytical, cooly realistic but also warmly optimistic. Quite gripping in its clarity and candour really an inspiration. But then you've been an inspiration to me for a long time. It must be about 12 years now since we met maybe more. You were still working on your PhD. We had some happy years sharing a home here in London and there's nothing like sitting around a kitchen table covered with the morning's rumpled guardian and the remains of supper as a space for the growth of ideas and projects. I learned a lot from you in those days and as I listened to your lecture just now I saw more clearly that an important part of that learning has been about the combining of activism with academic work. It's that link which you so well exemplify that I want to highlight in this very short tribute. What's so fascinating to me about your life and work is the way you've responded to the accidents in your life building a sense of self out of the elements offered to you by fate together with components that you've seen around you taken hold of and crafted. What I see is an emergent feminist woman inventing yourself while shaping change in the world around you. I'm thinking for instance that going to Egypt for your higher education a place with a long history of women's consciousness and what's more a lively present day women's rights organisation that was probably a combination of good luck and good choosing. Being born in Germany into the arms of Daggi and Sadig that was chance but the two families and the two countries Germany and Iraq that accident gave you've positively shaped through a combination of love political intelligence and academic curiosity into a source of strength for you and many other people. Another and very important combining of chance and skill has been finding feminism and how do any of us stumble on that it is a kind of miracle isn't it? Grasping what a powerful analytical tool gender is while never letting go the anger at what happens to women and never letting up on the action against sexism racism and other sources of oppression. Activism and academic research combine in interesting and complex ways and your work illustrates quite a few of them. Researching on action being simultaneously a researcher and an activist being an activist reflecting on action. Each mode represents a challenge and as you said in your talk activism and academia each carries its own set of rules and they aren't always in harmony with each other. Academic standards call for great rigor if the research is not to seem like mere partisan storytelling. While politically we need to be profoundly responsible towards co-activists if we aren't to exploit them in the interests of academic careers. Thank you Nadia for the model you are to others of us who try to combine activism and academic life. Universities aren't the only source of knowledge. You've written about women in Iraq but women who don't read your books have deepened their knowledge of Iraq through your activism. You mentioned women in black our anti-militarist network some of us are here today and you saw the picture of the vigil the photograph. We were linked you and me and others in women in black and you set up act together women's action for Iraq about the same time that we were standing on the street concerned with Iraq. In women in black we wanted to maintain a street presence demonstrating every week against sanctions and war but we badly needed a secure grounding in and among Iraqi women so that the information we put out and our public statements reflected their realities and needs. It was act together that furnished this and that exhibition you mentioned our lives in pieces an exhibition of Iraqi artifact and memorabilia it sticks in my mind so clearly it was totally transformative of the way I and the people standing around me in that room saw and understood Iraqi people otherwise reduced to victims by the media as well as by the bombs falling on them. We shouldn't overlook the fact that listening to each other and thinking on our feet activists can build useful knowledge and even theory but then again too out of theory can come progressive change you've shown how work within the institution of a university can be political and creative I'm deeply impressed by your recent initiative connecting so as to Kara's Iraq Fellowship Programme and even more with a wonderfully creative and I'm sure very difficult project linking so as to women academics in Iraqi Kurdistan. So I'd like to end this short appreciation of your seriously important contribution to women to feminist activism and to social theory with first actually a tribute to Mark your partner. You can be sure if this were a man giving his inaugural someone would mention the woman in the shadows who's been his quote unfailing support unquote so I'm not going to miss the chance to honour Mark a person fantastically gifted for child care and music and to add a footnote on your little Elena a star and finally finally finally I want to end with congratulations to the School of Oriental and African Studies congratulations on recognising the outstanding qualities of Nadia Al Ali and by designating her professor affirming her belonging in this clever committed and caring community. Thank you.