"Women in revolt. Mobilizations, pathways, imaginations – the Arab Mediterranean 1950-2020"

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Campus Condorcet/ Aubervilliers)

10-12 February 2021

The ERC Dream programme has launched a Call for Papers for a three-day conference dedicated to women in revolt in the Arab Mediterranean world (1950s to the present). In the framework of the research undertaken by Dream on revolts and revolutions, the conference seeks to shed light on the protagonists who are the most invisible in the human and social sciences and in collective memory. While much work has been devoted in recent decades to the place of women in societies and in struggles (Bereni, Révillard, 2001; Kréfa et Barrières, 2018), it is clear that the figure of the revolted or revolutionary woman has more recently been forcefully renewed by women’s voices in the context of the Arab Spring of 2011 and the new uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq.

This conference wants to examine the question of the role played by women in the struggles for emancipation in the Arab World. The first step is to grasp this issue beyond the singularization of heroic and exceptional female figures, be they fighters like Leila Khaled (Palestine) or Djamila Bouhired (Algeria), or feminist intellectuals like Nawal Saadaoui (Egypt) or Fatima Mernissi (Morocco). This work on women’s mobilizations is committed to understanding the role played by women in political, cultural and social struggles. The work should also help to understand how women’s struggles have transformed these struggles and have been able to instigate radical transformations of society, towards a revolutionary perspective that may not always have been grasped by traditional understandings of the term "revolution".

You can read the full CfP here to learn more about the questions to be tackled at the conference.

The contributions must be based on empirical research grounds. A specific reflection on sources, archives and the act of archiving will have to be present in the proposals.

Please send your proposal (400-500 words, in English or French) before September 1st, 2020 to:

dream@cmb.hu-berlin.de

For any question or remark, please contact Leyla Dakhli, dakhli@cmb.hu-berlin.de