Conference Presenters

Panel One: Histories and Geographies

  • Diala Lteif

    Diala Lteif is a doctoral candidate in Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on displacement, labor mobilizations and class struggle through an urban historical study of Karantina, a neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon. She is a 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholar and an Ontario Trillium Foundation awardee. In 2011, Diala was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design. She also has over 7 years of graduate and undergraduate teaching experience, in addition to an ongoing freelance design practice with NGOs and private sector companies.

  • Fatima Ahmed

    Fatima Ahmed is a first-generation Pakistani immigrant as well as a writer and activist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, a Juris Doctor from the University of Windsor, and is a current LLM candidate at the Osgoode Hall Law School. Her writing, both fictional and non-fictional pieces published in various online and literary journals. She is the recipient of the Social Justice Fellowship 2019, the Equity and Diversity Award 2020, the JW Whiteside award, as well as the Harley D Hallett Scholarship. Fatima’s legal interests include immigration and refugee law, human rights law as well as advocating for intersectional feminist approaches.

  • Nisrine Chaer

    Nisrine Chaer is an activist-academic who lives in Lebanon and the Netherlands. His research interests lie at the intersection of queer anthropology, migration, transgender studies, Middle East and cultural studies. He graduated from the Gender & Ethnicity Master’s at Utrecht University where he wrote his thesis on queer activism in Beirut. In 2017, he co-founded Sehaq Queer Refugees Group, a refugee-led grassroots leftist organization in Amsterdam that works on creating safer spaces for queer & trans refugees, centering Middle Eastern & North African experiences and politics. Currently, he is working on a PhD project at Utrecht University about geographies of home with a focus on MENA queer & trans migration in the Netherlands and in Lebanon.

  • David Semaan

    David Semaan is in his second year of the PhD program in the Department of Politics at York university. His work engages on critical race and feminist analyses of contemporary Canadian public policy, especially as it concerns securitization, policing and prison. David’s current research is interested in mapping Canada’s position onto the circulation of political economies of surveillance and carcerality. He aspires to develop methods of community engaged research to speak with BIPOC activists in the queer community in Canada and in SWANA countries.

Panel Two: SWANA Feminisms

  • Sumaiya Al-Wahaibi

    Sumaiya is a PhD researcher in Gender and Politics, a pioneer in educational and cultural volunteerism and mainly interested in women’s political participation. She holds a fellowship from the former United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-moon Center for Global Citizenships, a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Hull, UK, a Master’s degree in International Relations from Lodz University, Poland, and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Sultan Qaboos University. She was chosen recently as a Gender Innovation Agora 2021- Young Leader by UN Women. She is currently working as an International Relations Specialist at UNESCO NatCom.

  • Maryam Lashkari

    Maryam Lashkari is a third year PhD candidate in Human Geography at York University. Her area of research includes critical and feminist geopolitics, geopolitics of the Middle East, and politics of urban public space. She has conducted a comparative research project on queer spaces in Tehran and Madrid in which she examined the impacts of city planning and design practices on creating social exclusion under authoritarian and neoliberal urban policies. Her PhD research project focuses on feminist and queer urban activism in Tehran within the ongoing geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East.

  • Douja Mamelouk

    Douja Mamelouk obtained her Ph.D. in Arabic Language, Literature and Linguistics from Georgetown University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Arabic/French at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. She has published “When a Whisper Becomes a Scream: Tunisian Oral Culture in a Postcolonial Woman’s Novel,” (Journal of African Literature Association, volume 10.2., pp. 176-188, Spring 2016), “Geography of New National Discourses: Tunisian Women Write the Revolution” (Alif:Journal of Comparative Poetics, volume 35, pp. 100-122, May 2015) and “Ali Du‘aji and al-‘alam al’adabi: A Voice of the Tunisian Avant-Garde in Colonial Tunisia.” (Journal of North African Studies, volume 21.5, pp. 794-809, Fall 2016) Her current article under review is titled “Ouatann and Cocotte: Arabic in French and French in Arabic in Two Tunisian Women’s Novels” (forthcoming in the Journal of North African Literature).

Panel Three: Resistance and Refusal

  • Samira Lavei

    Samira was born and raised in Toronto to Kurdish immigrants from Iran. She is fluent in four languages, English, Kurdish, Farsi, and Spanish and she holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Political Science. She is currently a 4th year Ph.D. candidate at York University, and she specializes in Women and Politics and International Relations. Her dissertation currently focuses on the construction of gender in armed groups in Colombia. While her research primarily focuses on Latin America, she has experience studying gender within the Kurdish regions and previously presented her research in international conferences including the World Kurdish Conference.

  • Rasmieyh Abdelnabi

    Rasmieyh R. Abdelnabi is an instructor and doctoral candidate of sociology at George Mason University. She holds a master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. Her master's thesis focused on young women activists in the occupied Palestinian territories. Her research interests include gender and feminist studies, political activism among Palestinian women; informal politics, cultural preservation/continuity, resistance, and the effects of state violence on everyday life. Rasmieyh’s dissertation focuses on informal politics in women-only spaces. She recently produced a report mapping out the women’s movement in Palestine.

  • Samiha Olwan

    I am a Palestinian researcher in Literary, Cultural and Gender Studies with a PhD in Comparative Literature, Murdoch University, WA and MA in Cultural Studies from Durham University, UK; I completed my Bachelor degree in English Literature from the Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine. I have also worked closely with women at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, Palestine, on documenting women’s narratives of Israeli aggressions of 2009 and 2012.

  • Maysam Abu Khreibeh

    Maysam (she/her) is a Muslim, Palestinian educator, poet and organizer. Through her work with organizations such as the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and the Levana Gender Advocacy Center, Maysam is committed to seeking collective liberation from an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-statist lens. She is a recent graduate from Queen’s University with a degree in Global Development Studies, and a BEd with a specialization in Indigenous education. Her academic research interests center Palestinian indigenous ways of knowing, joint struggle from Turtle Island to Palestine, and diasporic questions of (re)imagining home, the land and belonging.

Panel Four: Time and Temporality

  • Celia Ringstrom

    Celia is a white settler living in Sacramento, California on the unceded lands of the Nisenan people. She is an MA candidate in Anthropology at York University, interested in intersectional social justice movements organized against white settler colonialism, and how girlhood is constructed, negotiated, and contested through these movements. She is specifically interested in understanding the experiences and practices of sumud, or steadfastness, articulated in the political imaginaries of Palestinian refugee girls who, as both Indigenous and racialized, continue to be under- or mis-represented through neo-Orientalist and Zionist humanitarian projects. Celia received her BA in Anthropology and Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  • Rasha Anayah & Lenna Zahran Nasr

    Rasha Anayah is a PhD candidate in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. She was named after her grandmother and grew up learning about Palestine through her. Currently, she is involved with the Palestinian Youth Movement and is a part of the STEM committee.

    Lenna Zahran Nasr is a software engineer with a lifelong love of STEM and medicine. She is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement and sits on its STEM committee."

  • Mohamed Tonsy

    Mohamed Tonsy is a queer Egyptian writer and a recent PhD graduate of Edinburgh University. He is currently working on his first novel, a bildungsroman set in a near-future Egypt that considers generational trauma resulting from the Arab Spring. In 2019, Mohamed combined excerpts from his manuscript with ceramic pieces for an exhibition titled “Gawabat” at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. Mohamed’s writing has appeared in Sukoon, Gutter Magazine, is set to appear in Epoch Press’s Spring 2022 issue, Mizna’s upcoming Experimental issue, and has been shortlisted for MFest’s 2021 Short Story Competition.

Panel Five: SWANA Futurities

  • Soumyadeep Bidyanta

    Soumyadeep Bidyanta is an MA graduate of School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He is a recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship award, given by University Grants Commission. His main research interests include Nuclear proliferation, Indian Foreign Policy and the geopolitics of the Middle Eastern and North Africa region.

  • Nuzhat Khurshid

    Nuzhat Khurshid is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at York University. Her research seeks to understand religious agency through the lens of feminist and universalist expressions and goals. She is interested in feminist political theory, decolonial theory, critical theory, phenomenology, Marxism and postsecularism. She lives in Vaughan with her husband and three daughters.

  • Mitra Shamsi

    My research is situated at the intersection of feminist media studies and political communication, looking at the mediation of women's rights and contemporary gendered campaigns in Iran. I am currently a visiting fellow at The Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode, York University. I also act as a researcher at the University of Tehran, and the Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology. I worked for several years as a journalist in national newspapers and for news agencies in Iran.

  • Nehal Elmeligy

    Nehal Elmeligy is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology minoring in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio in 2018. Her publication, based on her MA research, entitled Making a Scene: Young Women’s Feminist Social Nonmovement in Cairo is published in the Journal of Resistance Studies. In her dissertation fieldwork in Egypt in 2022, she plans to conduct a feminist ethnography to study the emerging feminist counterpublic on social media and everyday feminist resistances in urban public spaces.