Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones

On behalf of the Departments of Political Science, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Sociology, Africana Studies, Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures, and the Global Middle East Studies Program, you are invited to a talk by Dr. Nada Elia and Dr. Tina Beyene titled, Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones. In this talk, Dr. Elia and Dr. Beyene will discuss the linkage between sexual violence in Palestine, Rwanda, and the Congo through colonial and settle-colonial frameworks.

What: Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones

Nada Elia is a Visiting Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at Western Washington University, where she is also affiliated with the Program in Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A scholar activist, she has served on the steering collectives of AWSA, RAWAN (Radical Arab Women’s Activist Network), and INCITE! Feminists of Color Against Violence and is currently on the Coordinating Committee of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Nada is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto, 2023) and is currently working on “Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms,” forthcoming from Verso in 2025.

Tina Beyene is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of transnational feminism; African feminism; postcolonial theory; gender and conflict zones; African feminist movements; and imperial foreign policy. She was a former publisher and editor at South End Press, a progressive publishing collective based on a participatory economics model, where she worked on topics such as global water rights; advanced capitalism and inequality; and the prison industrial complex.