About the Lecture
This talk will draw on Walaa Alqaisiya’s work with Palestinian queer grassroots activism to discuss the political and conceptual urgency of centering settler-colonialism to gender and sexuality issues in the context of Palestine, the MENA region, and beyond. In doing so, the talk will take the recent uprising and political events in Palestine as a prism to view and understand the context and historical location of Palestinian queer feminist organizing and the decolonial lens they advance.
About the Speaker
Walaa Alqaisiya is an associate researcher at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics (LSE), and Council for British Research in the Levant. Previously, she worked as an external collaborator at the European University Institute on the Libya Initiative Project. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University in 2018. Her research examines the transformative political potential of everyday activism and aesthetics in the ambit of gender and sexuality in Palestine. Starting in 2022, she will be a Marie Curie Fellow at Columbia University, Ca ’Foscari University of Venice, and the London School of Economics where she will examine the relationship between environmental and gendered politics across multiple contexts of indigeneity.
Supported by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund.
