Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien

Di­gi­ta­le, internationale Lehr­ko­ope­ra­tio­nen (COIL)

Neben den Auslandsaufenthalten unterstützt das ZtG digitale, internationale Lehrkooperationen (COIL steht für Collaborative Online International Learning).

International Hybrid Workshop:
“Reclaiming Presence: The Politics of Representation for SWANA Women”
For Master’s and Postgraduate Students

Dates: 14–15 January 2026
Location: Room H1085, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, and online

The Two-Day Hybrid Workshop engaged with Politics of Representation for SWANA Women. This event seeked  to critically examine and deconstruct the narratives surrounding women from the South West Asian and North African (SWANA) region. Through keynote lectures, panels, and graduate presentations, we explored strategies for reclaiming agency in literature, media, music, and academia.

This workshop is a core component of the Circle U–COIL Project “Women on the Go: Contemporary Discourses and (Re)Presentations across SWANA.” It builds upon the foundational collaboration between our institutions—previously focused on “Body Aesthetics and Challenging Boundaries in the Contemporary MENA Region”—to expand our collective inquiry into the complex cultural, political, and social forces shaping gender, body politics, and identity in contemporary SWANA societies. This workshop Format is designed for postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers specializing in Gender Studies, SWANA/MENA Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Cultural Studies, and related fields.

Looking back at the Program of the 14–15 January 2026 at Humboldt University of Berlin:

Day one was opened by the Workshop Organisers, followed by keynote lectures. Prof. Maha El Said (University of Cairo) presented “She Resists: Body Politics between Radical and Subaltern,”. Dr. Nahid Siamdoust (HU Berlin) spoke on the politics of music in Iran. Dr. Nahid presented several Iranian voices of resistance, more concrete singing voices of resistance and their use of social media platforms like TikTok. These presentations were followed by a seminar on feminist and queer approaches, featuring Prof. Hanadi Al-Samman (University of Virginia) presenting “Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings.”

The Day closed with a special conversation on literature, gender, and translation with distinguished journalist-writer-translators Nael Eltoukhy and Saïd Khatibi brought insights into their process of writing about women, motherness and embodying the female in resistance to gender related Stereotypes. They both approach storytelling as a tool to provide outside as well as inside perspectives to the mothers figure in the SWANA region. The talk raised questions about performative femininity and the embodiment of gender as a social construct.

Day 2: Thursday, 15 January | Reclaiming Presence

The second Day started with a group discussion on „Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran“ moderated by Prof. K Soraya Batmanghelichi. A close reading of Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Text „Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran“ raised questions of mapping the catography of sexual desire and archiving the real life. Najmabadi’s book attempts to map out a situated “cartography of desire” in Iran that locates the contemporary discourses and practices of transsexuality in a longer. Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran through ethnographic and historic research.

Graduate Students Perspective: A graduate research panel was chaired by the senior scholars Dr. Amany Abdelrazek-Alsiefy, Humboldt University of Berlin, Prof. Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, University of Oslo, Prof. Teresa Pepe, University of Oslo and Dr. Ahou Koutchesfahani (King’s College London) as discussant commentary.  Noha Sherif (HU Berlin), Live Tronsad (University of Oslo) Ali Novello (HU Berlin) and Zagros Ghalvazi (University of Oslo) presented their papers and gave insights into their process of work. Throughout the discussion with the senior scholars, the students received decisive criticism of their papers in order to further refine and advance their research.

Noha Sherif (HU Berlin) presented the Paper „Staying Oriented: Migration, Affect, and Beauty in Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog. This paper adopts a phenomenological approach to migration and exile by bringing Sara Ahmed’s concepts of orientation into dialogue with Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog. It asks how subjects remain oriented, how they sustain direction, attachment, and relation when migration and racialization have fractured the familiar spatial, temporal, and social coordinates that once made the world feel “within reach.” “orientation” describes the embodied and affective ways subjects come to face certain objects, follow particular paths, and sustain direction in the world. Through close readings of fog and sea in Sea and Fog, the paper shows how Adnan figures disorientation as a phenomenological experience lived at the level of the body, and how beauty, nature, hope, and rage function as affective orientations that keep the subject in relation to the world despite exile and war.

Live Tronsad‘s (University of Oslo) Paper „Negotiating Birth: Caesarean Sections, Medical Authority, and Women’s Agency in Egypt“ offers a preliminary exploration of why CS are so prevalent in Egypt and outlines how this phenomenon may be studied further in Live Tronsads master’s thesis. Although reproduction is considered a “prestige zone” within the medical anthropology of the Middle East, few studies have examined the rapid increase in CS in Egypt or the experiences of women undergoing this procedure. Exploring this topic offers insight into how childbirth, as central to gendered and embodied experiences, shapes women’s subjectivities through different modes of delivery.

Ali Novello (HU Berlin) argued in the paper „What does it take to mobilize in the West? Palestinian Women, Selective Solidarity, and Digital Media (Mis)Representation“ that, despite Palestinian women’s central role in digital resistance and documentation, Western solidarity movements continue to mobilize affect primarily through white, male voices, revealing persistent hierarchies of representation embedded in media systems and solidarity practices. The concept of affective publics is utilised in the analysis of the political potential of online movements, carried by juxtaposing the #blocchiamotutto movement with the history of western media representation of Palestinian women movements post 2011. The essay further conceptualises the limitation of social media platforms by design as a site for self determination for Palestinian women, questioning how platform’s sociotechnical components impact the reach of marginalized voices, reproducing existing logics of domination and hierarchies of solidarity.

Zagros Ghalvazi‘s (University of Oslo) Paper „An Intersectional Look at Women as Kolbars“ examines the experiences of female kolbars using an intersectional framework, emphasising how gender interacts with ethnicity, poverty, and border regimes to shape participation in informal cross-border labour along the Iran–Iraq border. Although kolbari has been extensively examined as a survival strategy rooted in structural marginalisation, the specific experiences of women remain insufficiently addressed. Drawing on Persian-language quantitative and qualitative research, the analysis explores how gender reshapes the border’s political economy and alters the distribution of risk, labour, and visibility within kolbari.

The workshop concluded with the plenary discussion, "Where Do We Go from Here? Sustaining the Dialogue," focused on future collaboration and network-building.

Guest Speakers

• Prof. Maha Al-Said, Cairo University
• Dr. Nahid Siamdoust, Humboldt University of Berlin / University of Vienna
• Prof. Renata Pepicelli, University of Pisa
• Nael Eltoukhy, Novelist, Translator, and Journalist
• Said Khatibi, Novelist, Translator, and Journalist

Workshop Facilitators

• Dr. Amany Abdelrazek-Alsiefy, Humboldt University
• Prof. Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, University of Oslo
• Prof. Teresa Pepe, University of Oslo

Vernetzungen