Join this round table discussion on what it means to be a woman of colour starting out a career in academia. We will be discussing the intersection of race and gender and how that translates into the experiences and obstacles of an early career researcher.

Speakers

Sophie Chamas is a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS. She has a PhD in Modern Middle East Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was also an Ertegun Scholar. Grounded in anthropology, her work focuses on the study of social movements, counter-culture, and political theory and discourse rooted in, focused on or related to the Middle East. She is interested in thinking through the life, death and afterlife of the radical political imaginary in the Middle East and beyond. Sophie is also an essayist and writer of creative non-fiction. Her writing has appeared in Kohl: a journal for body and gender research, The State, Raseef 22, Mashallah News, Jadaliyya and The Towner, amongst other publications.

Surer Mohamed is a final-year PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, where her research considers post-conflict urban reconstruction and conflict-related property disputes in Mogadishu, Somalia. Surer is the recipient of the David and Elaine Potter Cambridge Trust Scholarship, and she is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests include space and urban post-conflict reconstruction, contested memory and discourses of belonging after war, and the politics of knowledge production in the Horn of Africa.

Moderator

Lina Ashour is a Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Manager at SAGE Publishing. She is an Egyptian writer and community organiser. Her studies have included political science, journalism, mass communication, and gender studies.