Nicola Pratt: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon

Department of Middle Eastern Studies invites you to a lecture by Professor Nicola Pratt on Thursday, 21 April 2022, 17:45 at Jan Palach Square 2, room P104! During the talk, Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick) will introduce her latest book Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon.

When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the Arab Spring, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region’s gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women’s activism. Moving beyond such culturalist accounts, this book turns to the relations of power in regional and international politics to understand women’s struggles for their rights. Based on over a hundred extensive personal narratives from women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Nicola Pratt traces women’s activism from national independence through to the Arab uprisings, arguing that activist women are critical geopolitical actors. Weaving together these personal accounts with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, Embodying Geopolitics demonstrates how the production and regulation of gender is integrally bound up with the exercise and organization of geopolitical power, with consequences for women’s activism and its effects.

Nicola Pratt is a professor in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist and decolonial approaches and a focus on ‘politics from below.’ She has written and co-edited a number of books on women and gender in the Middle East. Her most recent monograph, entitled, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, was published by University of California Press in fall 2020 and was awarded the Susan Strange Prize for the best book by the British International Studies Association. She has also written extensively on Egyptian ‘politics-from-below’ and is currently co-authoring a book on popular culture and the contested meanings of the 2011 Egyptian revolution; which is also the subject of a multimedia, digital archive that she co-curated.