Date and time: Tuesday, March 21, 2023. 1 – 3:30 p.m.
Virtual Event via Zoom (Zoom link will be sent out Monday, March 20).
This is a registered event. See below for link.
Recently, blatant infractions on women’s rights in Afghanistan have garnered outrage, interest and despondency from the global community. With increasing restrictions on education, movement and work, human rights activists are concerned about the impact of these policies on women’s future in Afghanistan. Stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, rights activists navigate domestic oppressions and international imperialism in defending women’s rights in untenable circumstances.
How does the history of Nation-building, occupation, international relations and power dynamics in Afghanistan impact the current situation? Who bears responsibility for women’s rights in Afghanistan? Beyond the collective outrage, how can the international community work in solidarity with activists to protect hard-won rights?
Join us in our Global Public Sociology Conversation series as panellists share experiences, challenges, and dreams as women’s rights activists in Afghanistan.
Speaker Bios
Zahra Nader is an Afghan Canadian journalist and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a media that covers human rights violation in Afghanistan with a focus on women, LGBTQI community and environmental issues. She started her career in 2011 in Kabul, writing and editing for Afghan local media outlets. In 2016, she joined the New York Times bureau in Kabul, becoming the first Afghan woman journalist to work with a mainstream English language media since 2001. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada, pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies at York University.
Mina Sharif is a communications advisor and grassroots mobilizer with a focus on Afghanistan. Raised in Canada, she returned to her birth country Afghanistan in 2005 to support women led radio stations throughout the country. Over the next fifteen years, she worked for various Afghan led private media organizations including Moby Group where she directed Baghche SimSim the Afghan version of Sesame Street. Mina also wrote and directed Voice of Afghan Youth, a TV and radio series filmed in 11 provinces and is the founder of Sisters 4 Sisters mentorship program. She currently leads Compassion First Consultancy and various volunteer initiatives supporting at risk families and communities in Afghanistan.
Sahar Fetrat is an Assistant Researcher with the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Sahar is a feminist activist born in Afghanistan, lived in Iran and Pakistan as a young refugee during the first Taliban regime. She grew up in Kabul as her family returned to Afghanistan in late 2006 when she was 10. Sahar encountered feminist activism in her teenage years in Kabul and decided to incorporate her feminist views into storytelling through documentary filmmaking and writing. In 2013, Sahar’s documentary on street harassment, “Do Not Trust My Silence,” won the first prize in Universo-Corto Elba Film Festival. Sahar has previously worked with the education unit of UNESCO in Afghanistan, advocating for literacy education for women around the country. She has gained first-hand experience working with children who have been victims and survivors of war through volunteering with the Solace for the Children initiative. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the American University of Afghanistan (2018) and a Master’s degree in Critical Gender Studies from Central European University (2020). She is currently completing her second Master’s degree in Conflict, Security, and Development at the War Studies department of King’s College London. Sahar’s research interests include feminist decolonial theory and praxis, affect theory, gender and conflict, women and/in war, and masculinities.
Register at https://laps.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=1832348 by 3 p.m., Monday, March 20. Zoom link will be sent out later that day.