Draft:Nadine Naber

Nadine Naber is a Jordanian public scholar, activist, author, and teacher. Receiving her doctoral degree from the University of California, Davis in 2002, she is currently a Professor at the University of Illinois in the Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies.

Books

Dr. Naber has authored and co-edited five books: Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (Duke University Press, 2016); and Towards the Sun (Tadween Publishing-George Mason University, 2018).

Research

Dr. Naber has conducted four major research projects. The first entailed a feminist analysis of Arab American families, identities, and activism. The second focused on race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11. The third entailed an analysis of revolutionary feminist activism in Egypt and Lebanon.The fourth addresses revolutionary mothering in Chicago, currently under contract with Haymarket Press.

OpEds

Dr. Naber writes regular OpEds and news articles for outlets like Truthout, Jacobin, and Jadaliyya on issues such as prison abolition, the war on terror, surveillance of Muslim Americans, racial justice for Arab Americans, women of color feminisms, Palestinian feminisms, and more. She was one of Chicago Reporter’s 2021 “New Voices”, and has been recognized as an exceptional leader by the OpEd project for her OpEds.

Liberate Your Research Workshops

Dr. Naber’s Liberate Your Research workshops train scholars and activists in the theories and methods from the constraints of the academic and non-profit industrial complexes. She has been invited to conduct her workshops at places like the University of California, Berkeley; Georgetown University; the National Women’s Studies Association; the American Anthropological Association, the University of Michigan; and more.

Public Lectures

Dr. Naber gives public lectures in social movement spaces like the Allied Media Conference; The Color of Violence; the Knowledge Workshop in Lebanon; Jewish Voices for Peace, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in San Francisco, and Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt.

She is often invited to speak at public school districts and libraries; on radio shows, podcasts and video shows; and at hundreds of universities in the U.S., in the Middle East and beyond.

In 2019, she was chosen as a TEDX speaker by Oak Park TEDX Women to produce the talk, Arab Feminism is not an Oxymoron.”

Awards

Dr. Naber is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions such as the Silver Circle Teaching Award (UIC); the Earl and Edna Stice Social Justice Award Department of Women’s Studies (University of Washington); the Open Societies Foundation designation as an international advisor; the United Nations designation as an expert author; the Institute for the Humanities’ Faculty Fellowship; the American Studies Association’s designation as a distinguished speaker; the YWCA Evanston’s YWomen’s Leadership Award; and the OpEd Project’s exceptional leadership recognition.

Activism, Scholarship, and Institution Building

In the 1990s, Nadine co-founded the Seattle, San Francisco, and North American chapters of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA). Through AWSA, she co-created an Arab feminist movement that worked to dismantle the sexist and homophobic systems of U.S.-led war and racism and to integrate Arab feminist perspectives into U.S. feminist of color movements. With AWSA, Nadine helped send delegations of Arab feminists to the UN World Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, Egypt 1994) and the UN World Conference on Women (Beijing, China, 1995). Nadine also helped AWSA integrate gender justice into the vision of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco Chapter (now Arab Resource and Organizing Center), while working with the Oakland-based Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC) to bring Arab American feminist perspectives on Zionism and racism to the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

After Dr. Naber completed her PhD from the University of California, Davis on Arab American activism in 2001, she moved to Cairo, Egypt to work as an Assistant Professor at the American University in Cairo. There, she built alliances with feminist organizations like the Women and Memory Forum and New Woman Foundation.

In 2002, Dr. Naber joined the national board of INCITE! (a network of feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities). With INCITE!, she helped integrate the idea that war is a feminist and LGBTQ concern into INCITE’s national conferences, resources for activists, and co-edited book The Color of Violence. She also served on the steering committee of movements like Racial Justice 911 to support immigrants and communities of color targeted by the post 9/11 backlash in the U.S. and the growing war of terror.

In the early 2000’s, Dr. Naber co-organized one of the first national conferences for Arab feminists in the U.S., the Arab Movement of Women arising for Justice.

For 10 years, Dr. Naber worked as a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003-2013). There, she co-founded the academic program, Arab and Muslim American Studies which places research and activism about Arab and Muslim Americans in relation to the wide range of indigenous, racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in the U.S and prioritizes community-based approaches that link universities with local Arab and Muslim American communities from a social-justice-based perspective.

Between 2011 and 2015, Dr. Naber joined feminist activists in Lebanon and Egypt to document and uplift the stories of their participation in the Arab Spring revolutions and related movements for democracy and regime change, culminating in publications like “The Radical Potential of Mothering during the Egyptain Revolution” and “Reflections on Feminist Interventions within the 2015 Anticorruption Protests in Lebanon.”

In 2013, Dr. Naber relocated to the University of Illinois Chicago where she was hired as a Co-PI of the Diaspora Cluster within the Chancellor’s Cluster Initiative for Faculty Diversity. At UIC, she is the faculty founder of the first center on a college campus serving the needs of Arab American students in the United States. The Arab American Cultural Center at UIC builds community, solidarity, and safe spaces while promoting social justice, equality, and inclusivity at UIC and the Chicagoland area. Dr. Naber has also served as a director and a steering committee member of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. At UIC, she also serves on the advisory board of the Social Justice Initiative at UIC and is co-director of the Race and Empire Working Group within the Institute for the Humanities.

Between 2013 and 2017, Dr. Naber supported the Arab Women’s Committee of Chicago to co-published a book written by and about Arab immigrant and refugee women about their struggles with displacement, immigration, and isolation and their path towards defining empowerment, dignity, and liberation on their own terms.

In 2020, she co-founded the collective, MAMAS (Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity). MAMAS is a collective of people conducting the labor of mothering in Black, indigenous, and people of color-based communities. Their vision is to integrate the voices and strategies of mamas into social movements, media debates, and policy processes about the systems sustaining U.S. empire and white-supremacy—from policing and immigration to colonization and war. MAMAS believe this integration is necessary in order to survive these systems and build the kinds of connections and alternatives needed to build a just and loving society.

Publications

Other Publications

• “To Abolish Prisons and Militarism, We Need Anti-Imperialist Abolition Feminism.” Co-authored with Clarissa Rojas. Truthout, July 16, 2021.
• “Palestinian Feminists Are Resisting Colonization by Fighting Sexual Violence.” Truthout, July 15, 2021.
• “U.S. Continues to Colonize.” Chicago Reporter, July 7, 2021.
• “Expanding Solidarity with the Arab Region Will Strengthen Prison Abolition.” Chicago Reporter, June 10, 2021.
• “We Will Not Stop Talking about Palestine.” Chicago Reporter, May 26, 2021.
• “We Must Commit Ourselves to Long-Term Solidarity with Palestinian Liberation.” Truthout, May 25, 2021.
• “Let’s Celebrate Mothers Who Are Fighting to Set Their Loved Ones Free.” Co-authored with Souzan Naser and Johnaé Strong. Truthout, May 9, 2021.
• “University Needs to Do Better When Identifying Race.” Chicago Reporter, May 5, 2021
• “El Saadawi Was Much More Than News Media Portrayed.” Chicago Reporter, April 15, 2021.
• “Rest in Power: Nawal El Saadawi, Intersectional Egyptian Feminist.” Chicago Reporter, April 4, 2021.
• “Including Arab Americans in the Biden Administration Is Not Enough.” Arab Center Washington DC, March 11, 2021.

• Reprinted in Jadaliyya, March 25, 2021.

• “Vaccines Aren’t Enough to Prevent the Spread of COVID-19 in Prisons.” Ms. Magazine, March 3, 2021.
• “Blatant Racism against Muslims Is Still with Us.” Chicago Reporter, March 3, 2021.
• “Seven Lessons the US Left Can Learn from Egypt to Resist Post-Election Fascism.” Co-authored with Atef Said. Truthout, November 3, 2020.
• “Mothers of Victims of Police Don’t Want Your Pity. They Want Solidarity—and Justice.” Ms. Magazine, September 30, 2020.
• “Radical Mothering for Abolitionist Futures Post-COVID-19.” Co-authored with Souzan Naser and Johnaé Strong. Abolition Blog, June 18, 2020. Reprinted in Truthout.
• “The 21st Century Problem of Anti-Muslim Racism.” Co-authored with Junaid Rana. Jadaliyya, July 25, 2019.
• “Here we go Again: Saving Muslim Women and Queers in the Age of Trump.” Jadaliyya, April 22, 2019.
• “Sectarianism and National Emergencies: Barriers of Facilitators for Women, Transgender People and Sexual Minorities.” Research Findings for the Knowledge is Power Project Website, American University in Beirut. 2018.
• Syllabus Co-Author, “Islamophobia is Racism: Resource for Teaching and Learning About Anti-Muslim Racism in the United States.” Available at: https://islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com/
• “Enough Already! Alternatives to Orientalist Feminism.” Review of Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving, and Karima Bennoune, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. Arab Studies Journal, 438-445.
• Muslims in the Midwest. Digital Archive Development at Michigan State University, launched in June 2017.
• “Organizing after the Odeh Verdict.” Jacobin Magazine, January 14, 2015.
• “Justice for Rasmea Odeh.” Middle East Research and Information Project, June 19, 2014.
• “Filipino Workers in the Middle East: Frictive Histories and the Possibilities of Solidarity.” Center for Art and Thought, 2013.
• “Transnational Anti-Imperialism and Middle East Women’s Studies.” Jadaliyya, July 2, 2013.
• “Human Rights from the Ground Up: Women and the Egyptian Revolution.” Institute for Policy Studies, June 27, 2013.
• “Imperial Feminism, Islamophobia, and the Egyptian Revolution.” Jadaliyya, February 11, 2011.