Contemporary Challenges: Knowledge Production, Globalization, and Identities Conference

In collaboration with Roaches Zine and Hibou Magazine, AUP Student Union is pleased to invite you to its first annual 
Contemporary Challenges: Knowledge Production, Globalization, and Identities Conference. 

The aim of the conference is to address issues around globalization and its effects on knowledge production and the political nature of discourse-making with a focus on identity. Moreover, it aims to examine the questions of how do our identities, multiple belongings and experiences influence our choice of research, its conduct and practice? How does our positionality influence the type of knowledge we produce? How can we produce knowledge that is reflexive and intersectional?

Title of Presentations and Speaker Bios
1. Knowledge Production, Decision-Making, and the “African Mindset” as a Barrier to Development 
by Walid Hdider: a Tunisian anthropology and international studies major at the University of Denver. His academic work focuses mainly on issues of decoloniality, narrative construction, knowledge production, and education within the global north/global south dynamic. Besides studying in 3 different countries, Walid engaged with questions of education reform and innovation as an educator, researcher, entrepreneur, and community organizer in Tunisia, Senegal, Turkey, Switzerland, and Mauritius. His undergraduate thesis examines the link between Laïcité and disaffection amongst Muslim youth in France.

2. Liberating the “Other” Woman, Teaching about and Implementing Feminist Development Policies in the Global South: From the White Woman’s Burden to Corporate Purplewashing 
by Dhouha Djerbi: is pursuing a BA in Psychology and Gender, Sexuality, and Society at The American University of Paris. Originally from Tunisia, Dhouha has lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates, the United States, France, India, Egypt, and South Africa. A data-enthusiast, she is dedicated to research in the fields of social and economic development in the Global South. In Paris, Dhouha is a labor rights activist and an advocate for sex worker rights. She’s the President of AUP Student Union and co-Editor of Chief of Roaches, a queer feminist militant zine dedicated to unmuting marginalized voices.

3. The In Betweenness and the Hyphenated Identity: A Micro Level Investigation of the Dutch-Moroccan Second Generation and the Third Space Through the Life History Interview 
by Amina Alaoui Soulimani: is an Arab-African social science undergraduate at the ALU (African Leadership University) in Mauritius. She is interested in the uncovering of silenced personal narratives within diasporic spaces, as well as the ways in which decolonial thinking can help redefine one’s worlds and inner experiences in postcolonial states. She is also a poet who appreciates flavored coffee at dawn, and experiments with portrait photography. Amina has worked with various minority groups in Morocco, Mauritius, The United States, Senegal, and the Netherlands, and aspires to pursue further ethnographic research at a graduate level focusing on the politics of aid and its impact on the subjectivities of the Global South.

4. The Rebranding of Judaism into a Religion and its Effects on Jewish Women’s Cultural Memory 
by Isabelle Siegel: is a senior at The American University of Paris from Brooklyn, New York, studying history and middle eastern studies. She has no idea what she’s doing once she graduates, but can’t wait to be surprised, and hopes it will foster as much thought and introspection as the past three years have.

5. « Ayons les femmes, le reste suivra »: Gender, Sexuality and the Colonial Project in French Algeria 
by Sanae Ehauleyan Alouazen: An intuitive rebel and an accidental scholar, she is a Moroccan student of International Comparative Politics and Gender Studies. With an activist background within anti-racist, immigrant, feminist and anti-capitalist circles, she later took interest in theory. Sanae is interested in pursuing interdisciplinary research in postcolonial theory, race, gender and political economy and in bridging theory and praxis.

Register now on AUP Engage