Tell us about your research project.
My new book, Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment, focuses on how self-identified feminist and women’s organizations in the asylum and humanitarian sectors in the UK and France attach meanings to and address refugee women's empowerment. From a feminist perspective, empowerment is a contested concept, as it has lost its grassroots activist roots and has been co-opted by neoliberal development objectives, such as individual capacity-building. However, in this book, I explore new approaches that prioritize women refugees’ political participation, visibility, and authorship as a means of facilitating empowerment. I explore how these strategies can support refugee women’s agency and acknowledge them as autonomous actors who are not dependent on humanitarian aid systems and can exercise political agency even before obtaining legal status in their host countries
Why did you choose this area of study?
I have a deep personal connection to my research. As an immigrant scholar, my life is shaped by migration policies, which dictate what I can and cannot do and determine the rights I have access to or am denied. However, even in so-called advanced democracies, migration is not recognized as a human right but rather framed as a security issue. Refugee women face a double burden as both refugees and women, which imposes vulnerability and anonymity on them while ignoring their agency and humanity. This is a political project, not an accurate reflection of reality. The refugee women I work with in my research are not victims; they are incredibly resilient and strong. Their ongoing everyday struggle for rights, equality and dignity is a major source of inspiration for me, both as a researcher and as an immigrant.
What do you hope will be the impact of your research?
In my work, I closely collaborate with smaller activist grassroots community organizations, as I am deeply committed to co-creating academic knowledge in partnership with marginalized communities and women from diverse backgrounds. I want my research to contribute to the broader goal of establishing refugee women as credible knowledge producers, rather than positioning them as default victims and perpetuating coloniality. Similarly, I aim to contribute to the ‘peopling of the International Relations discipline’ by acknowledging and recognizing the role that grassroots community organizations play in ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ IR scholarship.
What’s next for you and your research?
In what comes next, I remain committed to conducting research through active community engagement. I aim to focus on how grassroots migrant and refugee women’s organizations can participate in specific policymaking processes, such as the UK government’s National Action Plan under the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda. Adopting a transnational feminist lens, I seek to explore whether and how women have opportunities to influence policy, the obstacles they face in decision-making and the strategies they employ to navigate and impact WPS policy structures, particularly in terms of integrating issues of discrimination, xenophobia, and hate crimes within the current populist political climate in Europe.
Why is Gender Studies an important discipline to study and research?
The famous phrase commonly used among feminist International Relations scholars is "the personal is international": International policies have a significant impact on ordinary everyday lives of individuals. Adopting a gender lens to unpack these effects is the first step toward influencing permanent political change and achieving social justice and equality for all.