Highlighting Hidden Stories: Transnational Movements - Modernity, Enslavement and Domestic Labor

Title: Transnational Movements - Modernity, Enslavement and Domestic Labor
presented by Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations Students' Union

The panelists:

Dr. Leila Pourtavaf is Assistant Professor in Global Public History at York University. Dr. Pourtavar holds a PhD from the Department of History at the University of Toronto, and was most recently a visiting assistant professor at NYU's Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Her research stands at the intersection of gender, modernity, and Middle Eastern history with a focus on Qajar Iran. Her upcoming book project, The Cosmopolis Harem, looks at the social, cultural and spatial dimensions of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court in the second half of the 19th century.

Dr. Sumayya Kassamali is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Kassamali’s research addresses the transformation of gender, race, religion, and language in the context of transnational migration. Her current book project, Black Beirut, is an ethnography of African and Asian migrant labour in Beirut, Lebanon, and examines the experiences of primarily Ethiopian women who travel to Lebanon as domestic workers, only to flee conditions of abuse and enter the undocumented underground of the city.

Dr. Marina de Regt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main research interests are gender, labour and migration, in particular between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. She is the author of Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen (Syracuse University Press 2007) and co-edited the volume Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East: The Home and the World (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).

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