Palestinian Women in Gaza: War, Health, and Feminist Solidarity

Dr. Sawsan Abdulrahim is a Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on health promotion theory, social epidemiology, and forced migration. Her work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region. Her substantive research areas include migration and health; the syndemic of early marriage and mental distress in forced displacement; and aging and the wellbeing of women migrant care workers.

Zahra Ali is a sociologist and a feminist, and the author of Women and Gender in Iraq. 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, 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.

Dr. Lila Sharif is a creative writer, researcher, and assistant professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is currently writing a book called Olive Skins (forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press) about the ways in which fair trade economies, settler colonialism, and Indigenous storytelling converge at Palestine’s historic olive tree, which has been harvested by Palestinians for over 6,000 years. Sharif researches and publishes on environmental justice, Indigenous epistemologies, and ethnic and racial studies. Recently Sharif co-authored the book Departures (UC Press, 2022), with the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. She is currently co-editing Detours: A Decolonial Guidebook to Historic Palestine (forthcoming with Duke Press). She is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective as well as a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Sharif is the first Palestinian to earn a Ph.D. in ethnic studies. She holds a dual PhD in Sociology and Ethnic Studies.

Sarah Ihmoud is a Chicana-Palestinian anthropologist who works to uplift the lived experiences, histories, and political contributions of Palestinian women and Palestinian feminism. She is a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, an executive board member of Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, and is assistant professor of anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.