This event was the launch of the paper 'Art and Activism in Iraqi Kurdistan: Feminist Fault Lines, Body Politics and the Struggle for Space' by Dr Isabel Käser and Houzan Mahmoud. This paper is the outcome of a project run under the LSE Middle East Centre's Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme.

Meet the speakers:

Isabel Käser is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. She gained her PhD at SOAS, University of London, and is the author of The Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement: Gender, Body Politics and Militant Femininities (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Houzan Mahmoud is a Kurdish feminist writer, public lecturer, activist and the editor of Kurdish Women’s Stories (Pluto Press, 2021). For over 25 years, she has been an advocate for women’s rights in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. She holds an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, and is the co-founder of the Culture Project, a platform dedicated to raising awareness about feminism, art and gender in both Kurdistan and the diaspora.

Müjge Küçükkeleş is a teaching fellow at SOAS and a research associate at Global Partners Governance (GPG). She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled Governing Iraqi Kurdistan: Self-rule, Political Order and the International. Her research interests include humanitarianism, development, neoliberalism, sovereignty and political imaginaries beyond the state.

Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre, where she leads the project “Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”. Polly’s interdisciplinary work questions and explores how gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in popular culture and commercial media in the global south.

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