The Gendered Transnational Texts and Communities Network invites you to a conference on the theme ‘Decolonizing Identity’. The conference is based on Dr. Jyhene Kebsi’s course GEND3030, which has the same name. The mid-term assignment in this unit is a Self-Reflection, and this conference presents a selection of Personal Reflections written by the students who took the course. When Dr. Kebsi taught GEND3030, she chose a reflective writing assessment in order to encourage students to think about and question misrepresentations of various marginalized minority groups: immigrants, refugees, Arab women, Muslim Australians as well as the feminists, artists and academics who live in the Global South. In this assessment task, students were asked to explore personal experiences, feelings and events related to these marginalized groups and link them to the theories and concepts learnt through the unit materials.

Please come to our conference. Our conference is interactive and we would be grateful if everyone, to the best of their ability, is able to keep their cameras on to support the speakers and engage in the content.

We are very honoured to present our two keynote speakers, Dr Fatima Sadiqi and Dr Nawar Al-Hassan Golley.

Professor Fatima Sadiqi is a UN gender expert. She teaches Linguistics and Gender Studies at the University of Fez in Morocco. Her work focuses on women’s and gender issues in modern North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean world. In June 2018, she was elected President of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies – AMEWS, the first non-American to be elected to this post. She is author and editor of numerous volumes and journal issues, including Women, Gender and Language (Brill 2003), Women’s Activism and the Public Sphere: Local/Global Linkages (Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2006), Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean (Routledge 2013), Moroccan Feminist Discourses (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and Women’s Movements in the Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa (2016). Her current recent research interest resides in the intersection between violent extremism and gender in North Africa. Fatima Sadiqi is currently finalizing a book on Daesh Ideology and the Gender Challenge (to appear in Fall 2019). Fatima Sadiqi is also a public speaker in many languages and a member of many national and international scholarly and policy-making boards. Her work has been supported by numerous prestigious awards and fellowships from Harvard University, The Woodrow Wilson Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and Fulbright.

Professor Al-Hassan Golley teaches literary theory and gender and women's studies at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Al-Hassan Golley is the author of Reading Arab Women's Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells her Story (Texas UP 2003), editor of Arab Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity through Writing (Syracuse UP 2007), Mapping Arab Women’s Movements: A Century of Transformations from Within (AUC Press 2012), and Guest Editor of HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World’s “Beyond Boundaries: Exploring Arab Women’s Autobiographical Narratives.” In both her research and teaching, Al-Hassan Golley adopts an interdisciplinary approach drawing on her research in Literary Theory, Autobiography Theory, Post-Colonial Literatures and Discourses, Feminism, and Arab Women’s Movements.