She Who Struggles

Listen on Soundcloud Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

Who do you think of when you hear the phrase “revolutionary women”? If you cast your mind back to the movers and shakers of the revolutions that marked the 20^th century, what women’s names come to mind?

Those are some of the questions behind a new book, She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World. It’s a collection of thirteen essays exploring the lives of women at the forefront of twentieth century socialist and feminist upheavals around the globe, from Mali to the Philippines, from El Salvador to Pakistan.

Today we feature a roundtable conversation between five of the book’s contributors: Mahvish Ahmad, Yatta Kiazolu, Elif Sarican, and the volume’s co-editors, Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson.

Sorcha Thomson

Sorcha Thomson is an Editorial Fellow at History Workshop and an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD thesis explores the history of international solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. She is interested in the entangled histories of anti-imperial and left solidarity movements. She is co-editor of the books Palestine in the World (Bloomsbury, 2023) and She Who Struggles (Pluto Press, 2023).

Marral Shamshiri

Marral Shamshiri is a PhD candidate in International History at the London School of Economics. She is interested in the histories of socialism and internationalism, Third Worldism and the global cold war. Her current project looks at the history of the Iranian Left, focusing on the transnational and political connections between Iranian and Arab revolutionary movements in the long 1960s and 1970s. She is co-editor of the book She Who Struggles (Pluto Press, 2023).

Yatta Kiazolu

Yatta Kiazolu is an Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests meet at the interstices of twentieth century US and African American history, women and gender studies, and contemporary Africa and African diaspora studies. She is currently preparing a monograph which examines African American women’s organisations and the range of Black feminist solidarities with African decolonisation from the post-war years through the 1980s.

Mahvish Ahmad

Mahvish Ahmad works on the material legacies of anticolonial and Left movements, archival practices in sites of disappearance, fugitive organising under conditions of war, and the shifting techniques of imperial and sovereign violence, especially in Pakistan. She’s a co-founder of Revolutionary Papers, which studies anticolonial journals (with C. Morgenstern, K. Benson), a Trustee of the Islamabad-based South Asian Research and Resource Centre which holds 40,000 items on Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements, Archives of the Disappeared, which investigates archive in sites of annihilation (with M. Qato, Y. Navaro, C. Morgenstern), and Tanqeed, an English-Urdu magazine of the Left in Pakistan (with M. Tahir). She’s an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics.

Elif Sarican

Elif Sarican is a writer, editor, curator and translator. She has lectured at and collaborated with a number of cultural institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, HAU Hebbel am Ufer and universities across Europe and North America. Elif, a researcher and archivist, collaborates with artists in the exploration and preservation of visual depictions showcasing Kurdish life both in Kurdistan and across the diaspora. She is guest editing a special issue of Barnard College’s peer-reviewed S&F Online journal titled, ‘Rage, Struggle, Freedom: Politics of Hope and Love’, publication due in 2024.

Cancel reply