Decolonizing Knowledge Making on Iraq

This event is free and open to the general public. Registration is required.

CCAS, in partnership with Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University and Gender+ Justice Initiative at Georgetown University, is pleased to welcome Dr. Zahra Ali, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark, for Decolonizing Knowledge Making on Iraq.

Drawing on critical feminist perspectives, this lecture takes knowledge making on Iraq as a framework to raise essential questions about politics and geopolitics of knowledge production and on what constitutes the global academy today. It points out the structural, infrastructural, and political dimensions that led to Iraq being researched and theorized outside of its borders and highlights the systemic inequalities existing between scholars based in the US and scholars based in Iraq. It questions the production of knowledge and the development of research agendas stemming from institutions based in and tied to an imperial power that has destroyed the very possibility of the existence of a robust academic life in Iraq. It also proposes an alternative research imaginary that politicizes research ethics by putting justice and equality over an obsession for research.

Zahra Ali is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark, her research explores the dynamics of women and gender, race and class, as well as 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 (racial) capitalism, (post)coloniality, decolonial, and transnational feminisms as well as critical knowledge production and epistemologies, especially in relation to global and public sociology. She currently leads Critical Studies of Iraq an initiative aiming to foster, support, and develop the critical scholarship of social scientists and feminists based in Iraq. Ali works and writes in English, French and Arabic and is involved in feminist and critical knowledge production projects with activists and scholars from/in the Middle East and beyond.