The world has plunged into a new stage of state-orchestrated atrocities with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli civilians in October, 2023. As wars rage, the plight of women and LGBTQ+ people often goes unremarked. Panelists from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Iran, U.S. share intersectional feminist perspectives for building solidarity, ending racial, economic, and gender violence, and stopping colonial and imperialist wars. This panel was hosted by Barbara Smith, U.S. Black feminist author-activist. It was sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and recorded on December 6, 2023
Bios of Speakers:
Oksana Dutchak is co-editor of Ukrainian Spilne/Commons: Journal for Social Criticism. Dutchak holds a PhD in social sciences. Oksana is devoted to engaged and public research, which contributes to public discussion and policies, trying to give voice to women, workers and other structurally underprivileged groups.
Anwar Mhajne is a Palestinian political scientist specializing in international relations and comparative politics, focusing on cybersecurity, disinformation, gender, religion, and Middle Easter Politics. She is the co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Cybersecurity, Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions, Forthcoming with Oxford University Press (March 2024)
Yali Hashash is a Mizrahi queer feminist academic. She has a Ph.D. in Jewish History (Haifa University, 2011). Her research interests include social history of the 19th and 20th-century Palestine and the Middle East, poverty, gender, nationalism, ethnicity and religion. She is the author of Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism. (2022). member of Isha L’isha (woman to woman) Haifa Feminist center
Tova Benski is a Sociologist, senior lecturer emerita and a feminist and peace activist.. Her fields of academic interest and research include gender, social movements, peace studies, and the sociology of emotions. She has been engaged in research on the Israeli women’s peace mobilizations since the late 1980s and has published extensively and presented many papers on these topics. She is the co-author of the book internet and emotions (Routledge 2013), and co-editor of Current Sociology special issue(2013). Her co-authored book Iraqi Jews in Israel won a prestigious academic prize in Israel.
Barbara Smith is a U.S. Black feminist scholar and activist and co-author of the Combahee River Collective Statement. She is the editor of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983/2023) and author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom (1998/2023).
Frieda Afary, is an Iranian American public librarian, translator, activist and author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (2022). She is the producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation and socialistfeminism.org
Rasmus Fleischer
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