York University Professor Emerita Haideh Moghissi was invited to share her expertise on the topic of gender equality during a one-day conference held in Stockholm earlier this year.
Haideh Moghissi
Invited by Sweden’s Social Democrats parliamentary group and the National Association Against Honor Related Violence (GAPF), Moghissi was a plenary speaker during the GAPF International Conference on Jan. 22, which took place at the second chamber of the Swedish parliament.
The event explored the theme “Gender Equality vs. Gender Apartheid” and included presentations from and debates among: leaders of the parties of the Swedish parliament; ambassadors of France, Norway, Austria and Belgium; journalists; members of government agencies; and the social commissioner of Stockholm.
“The main theme of the conference was gender violence, including honour killing, the most tragic and certainly the ugliest of all forms of family-related crimes, that unlike what it is deliberately or unwittingly perceived is not limited to Muslim cultures alone and happens within Sikh and Hindu populations as well,” said Moghissi. “How to best address this dishonourable crime in societies that host large numbers of women asylum seeking was the dominant subject of discussions and debates at the conference.”
Moghissi, an internationally acclaimed analyst of women’s issues in the Muslim world, is recognized as a leading scholar of gender and Islam, Muslim diasporas and race relations.
She is a professor emerita of sociology and equity studies at York University, and also served as associate dean of External and International Relations for the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.
In recognition of her influential body of work, Moghissi was awarded a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in 2011. She is the recipient of several major awards for her work, including the Status of Women Award of Distinction from the Ontario Confederation of Faculty Associations (OCUFA) in 2015.
While in Stockholm, Moghissi also presented a lecture at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Stockholm, on the rise of West and Islamic right-wing populism and its impacts on women’s quest for equality.
This subject was also the theme of her lecture at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in November 2017. The visit also included leading a faculty seminar discussion on her earlier book Populism and Feminism in Iran (McMillan 1994). Renewed academic interest in populism that is sweeping the U.S. and Europe also took Moghissi to Germany in June and July 2017, where she was a keynote speaker on the right wing and Islamist populism at the international conference Populism and Citizenship at the University of Potsdam. Prior to that, she delivered a series of lectures on complexities of change and cultural diversity as a visiting professor at the University of Augsburg.