Ruba Salih

Ruba Salih, a social anthropologist by training, is a Reader in Gender Studies at SOAS. She has worked and published extensively on transnational migration, diaspora and multiculturalism from a gendered perspective. In the last two years she has been involved (together with Sophie Richter-Devroe, Exeter University) in a research project on the Palestinian refugees, for which she is conducting fieldwork in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan.

Amongst her publications: (2008) Musulmane Rivelate. Donne, Islam, Modernità, Carocci: Roma ISBN (Muslim Women Revealed. Gender, Islam and Modernity). Winner of the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize 2009, (2003) Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women. London, Routledge. (with A.Moors) (2009) (guest editors) “‘Muslim women’ in Europe: Secular normativities, bodily performances and multiple publics”, Special Issue: Social Anthropology, Volume 17 Issue 4, and (2010) “Transnational public spheres ‘from above’ and from ‘below’. Feminist transnational networks across the Middle East and Europe” in Anthropology of the Middle East. Vol.5, (1): 53-70.

Workshop: “Gender, Orientalism and Nationalism”
Wednesday April 25 at 14.00 – Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp

The lecture will address the centrality of the “woman question” and gender relations in Western and European colonial and Orientalist projects and representations. Further, it will analyse the ways in which this heritage has impacted forms and practices of liberation and emancipation in anti-colonial anti-imperialist struggles. Finally, the lecture will ask what are the spaces/practices and discourses available to Middle Eastern women and their struggles for self-determination in post-colonial predicaments.

Workshop: “Idea of Return”
Thursday April 26th 10.00-14.00 / Friday April 27th 10.00-14.00 – Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp

Debates on rights, democracy, dignity and pluralism seem to suffer from a chronic methodological nationalism, which perpetuates the idea that people seek and fight for rights exclusively in their national territory, the natural and main place for self-determination, so that those who are at the margins of nation-states or excluded from their own territorial nations come to be twice marginalised and their plague made even more invisible.

In this lectures/workshop we will discuss visions of refugeehood and rights. After having delineated the historical and political issues around refugeehood we will think of how refugees, by virtue of their peculiar status, can articulate new creative political cultures in relation to rights, statehood and justice more widely.

In particular, we will reflect of whether a “right to rights” should and could be articulated with the “right to return” and what political, institutional and cultural scenarios can accomodate such a vision.

Reflections on Campus in Camps April 2012
The following observations try to summarize some of the main issues I tried to convey in my discussion and lecture…

Reading materials

Searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah (external link)
A year has passed since Arab youth took to the streets demanding freedom and dignity, unleashing a long-awaited revolution…

Rethinking Palestinian Refugeehood (doc)
In 2002 the Arab Peace Initiative offered to Israel the scenario of a comprehensive regional peace in exchange for “…a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in conformity with Resolution 194”…

Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora (pdf)
Parallel states: A new vision for peace (pdf)