Date: November 13 2022
Time:11:30AM PST
Location: Online
Description: Mahnaz Afkhami is the author of Women in Exile and editor of Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World. Her new memoir The Other Side of Silence: A Memoir of Exile, Iran, and the Global Women’s Movement explores her journey from English professor to the first and only Minister of Women’s Affairs in Iran, to her life in exile in the United States following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Other publications from Afkhami include Claiming Our Rights; Toward A Compassionate Society; and In the Eye of the Storm: Women and the Law in Iran. Afkhami’s publications have been translated in several languages and distributed internationally. She is the founder and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership, a global partnership of twenty autonomous women’s rights organizations in the Global South that promote women’s leadership and human rights that creates curriculum and conducts international participatory leadership training.
Mona Tajali is Associate Professor of International Relations and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Agnes Scott College. Her areas of expertise are gender and politics, human rights, and social movements in Muslim
countries. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (open access), which investigates how religious and cultural norms, attitudes, institutional structures, and voter behavior affect representations of women and quality of democracy in Muslim contexts, with a comparative focus on Iran and Turkey. Her book, Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women, co-authored with Homa Hoodfar, is widely used as a training manual for those advocating for women’s increased political representation across the Muslim world. She has published in Middle East Journal, Politics & Gender, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, The Conversation, Jadaliyya, and The Nation.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Amuzegar Chair in Iranian Studies, Musa Sabi Term Chair of Iranian Studies
