Safeguarding Knowledge Production in the Arab Region

Soha Bayoumi

“Of Epidemics and Infodemics: Social Science Knowledge Production on COVID-19 in Egypt” 

Soha Bayoumi, PhD, is a political theorist and historian whose work addresses questions of health and social justice and the medicine-politics nexus, with a regional focus on the Middle East and a particular interest in postcolonial and gender studies. With a BA from Cairo University’s Faculty of Economics and Political Science and a Master’s and PhD from Sciences Po Paris, she taught at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science for ten years before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2021 where she is a Teaching Professor in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities program and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of the History of Medicine. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and associate editor of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS). Her research and teaching focus on medicine and authoritarianism; medicine, science, and resistance; gendered aspects of medical practice; and the visual cultures of medicine, science, and technology. She is working on a book manuscript on the roles played by doctors in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt since 2011, and her next book project is a historical examination of the social and political roles played by doctors in semi-colonial and postcolonial Egypt, with a focus on cinematic depictions of medicine and physicians.

Suhad Daher-Nashif

“Addressing Sexual Desire and Satisfaction in QoL Research Among Arab Women Throughout Their Menopause” 

Suhad Daher-Nashif (MSc. PhD) is a medical anthropologist and sociologist of health whose work bridges the social sciences, health professions education, medical education, and global health. Trained initially in Occupational Therapy, she later completed her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology, where she examined the sociopolitical life of the dead Palestinian body within the forensic medicine system. Her current research explores medical education in conflict and war zones, which she’s applying as part of her second MSc in Medical Education. Dr. Daher-Nashif’s research spans medical anthropology, gender and violence, dementia care, mental health, and the politics of death, often foregrounding the intersections of sociopolitical determinants, health sciences and bureaucracy. An educator deeply invested in interdisciplinary pedagogy, Dr. Daher-Nashif serves as Programme Director for the MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership and Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology of Health at Keele University. She has developed and led curricula across medicine, paramedic sciences, anatomy, public health, social sciences, and global health, with particular passion for feminist qualitative research, socially responsive health education, and the integration of behavioural and social sciences in biomedical programs. 

Hind Ahmed Zaki

“Subversive (Self) Censorship: Feminist Knowledge Production Under Authoritarianism in Contemporary Egypt”

Hind Ahmed Zaki is an assistant professor of Political Science and Literature, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. Before starting her position at the University of Connecticut, she was the Harold Grinspoon Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandies University (2018-2019), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School/ Middle East Initiative for the academic year 2017-2018. Ahmed Zaki received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in 2018. Her research has appeared in academic journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, Egypte/Monde Arabe, and the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights. Her public-facing scholarship appeared in the Washington Post, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), The Crown Center Middle East Briefs, Jadaliyya, and Mada Masr. Her current book project (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, Gendering Sovereignty, critically examines how post-revolutionary contestations around gendered citizenship, as manifest in negotiations over post-revolutionary constitutions, women’s citizenship rights, and gender-based violence, contributed to the making and unmaking of domestic sovereignty and the resurgence of authoritarian politics during the counter-revolutionary turn that followed revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia.

Sara Mourad

“Women with No Shame: Notes on the Politics of Sexual Transgression“

Sara Mourad is a writer, scholar, and assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. Her research explores transformations in gender, sexual, and family ideologies in contemporary Arab media and public cultures, with a focus on the Levant and Egypt, probing their broader political implications for how we represent and imagine the self, society, and nation. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media and Communication, and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, as well as the edited volumes The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2022) and Women in Revolt: Mobilizations and Political Imaginations in the Middle East and North Africa (Brill, 2026). Sara has also contributed essays, analysis, and commentaries in local and regional media platforms, including Jadaliyya, Al-Jumhuriya, Megaphone, Legal Agenda, and Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. She is currently at work on her first monograph, The Skull in the Attic: An Intimate History of Home in Postwar Lebanon, under contract with Syracuse University Press. Sara received her PhD in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Political Science at AUB. In 2018, she was a Global Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In 2021/22, she was an EUME fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. At present, she is a global fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University, Qatar.

Omar Tesdell

“Data-Keeping Under Duress: Open Data as Future Remnants in Palestine“

Omar Tesdell, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Birzeit University in Palestine. His research works to make more climate-adapted, resilient, and just agricultural landscapes. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Minnesota and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University in New York. His peer-reviewed research has been published in refereed journals such as: Ethnobiology Letters (2025) (link) Frontiers in Plant Science (2023) (link), Plants, People, Planet (2020) (link), Frontiers in Plant Science (2020) (link), Journal of Arid Environments (2020) (link), Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (2019) (link), and International Journal of Middle East Studies (2015) (link), Geoforum (2017) (link). He has also published with his research group, in Arabic, an article on the Makaneyyat critical geography concept and method (2022) (Original Arabic عربيlink) (English version link). He is Editor of Barari Flora, a growing online platform for plants in Palestine and the Levant. He has also edited an Arabic-English guide entitled Palestinian Wild Food Plants, 2018, as part of a community-based research collective.

Soraya El Kahloaui

“L’ethnographie visuelle et la mise en voix des dépossédés au Maroc [Visual ethnography and giving voice to the dispossessed in Morocco]“

Soraya El Kahlaoui holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is currently a researcher at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) – Palestine. Her work investigates the mechanisms of dispossession, the making and unmaking of land and property regimes, and the socio-political transformations taking shape across the MENA region, with a particular focus on Morocco, Tunisia, and Palestine. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and visual and spatial analysis, her scholarship interrogates how colonial legacies, postcolonial governance, and contemporary forms of neoliberal restructuring continue to shape the lived experience of space, rights, and belonging. Beyond her academic writing, Soraya is committed to multimodal and public-facing research practices. She directed the documentary Landless Moroccans, which examines land struggles and rural displacement, and has been screened at several international festivals. She also serves as the principal investigator of the Traab project, a collaborative counter-mapping initiative that documents property conflicts, land dispossession, and environmental transformations across North Africa and Palestine. Through interactive cartography and community archives, Traab seeks to democratise access to knowledge, make visible erased histories, and build transregional solidarities around land justice. Her work bridges scholarly research, visual storytelling, and collaborative methodologies, contributing to broader efforts to reimagine how knowledge is produced, circulated, and mobilised in contexts marked by colonial and postcolonial forms of domination