'Iraq 20 years after the US invasion: انتِ-فاضة / Uprising and the Political Imagination'

The Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Zahra Ali, sociologist and assistant professor at Rutgers University-Newark, presenting a lecture, “Iraq 20 years after the US invasion: انتِ-فاضة / Uprising and the Political Imagination.”

Twenty years after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, this talk takes the October 2019 uprising as a framework to understand contemporary politics of protests and social movements. It centers the mobilizations of women, youth and ordinary people and looks at issues of urban space, gender and sexuality, affects, and ‘politics of life and death’. It argues that centering Iraqi protesters’ subjectivities, trajectories and experiences can expand the theoretical and political imagination on empire, feminism and emancipation.

Ali’s research explores dynamics of women and gender, social and political movements, in relation to Islam(s), the Middle East, and contexts of war and conflict with a focus on contemporary Iraq. She is interested in empire, (racial) capitalism, (post)coloniality, decolonial and transnational feminisms as well as critical knowledge production and epistemologies. Ali is the author of “Women and Gender in Iraq” and co-author of “Decolonial Pluriversalism.” 

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