SJP at UCLA and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies Present Professors Ahlam Muthasib and Sa'ed Atshan in Palestine Through My Eyes: The Queer Movement and Oral Histories of Palestine

Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb is an associate professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino. She earned her M.A. in Government Relations and her Ph.D. in Computer-Mediated Communication from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. Her research interests include digital communication, social media, and diasporic communities. She has published her scholarship on digital communication and other communication sub-topics, and has presented her scholarship to national and international conventions and scholarly meetings. Her most recent projects include working on an upcoming documentary on the year 1948 and its catastrophic consequences; a project that has originated from her field work in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. In addition, most of her recent research focuses on digital media and social movements online or cyber activism. She will present about the use of narratives in search of identity!

Sa'ed Atshan is a Professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies department at Swarthmore. He graduated from Harvard University in 2013 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Sa’ed has won multiple awards and fellowships from important organizations that include the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, and in 2009, he was awarded a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. In addition to his work on humanitarian politics and aid intervention, Atshan has conducted research into nonviolent Israeli and Palestinian social movements, countering old characterizations of nonviolence as foreign to the region. Professor Atshan has worked with a range of organizations that include Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Seeds of Peace International Camp, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Atshan will be speaking about pinkwashing and the LGBT movement in Palestine!