Our Year

Some of the other activities we have been involved in during 2010/11

Waiting for the Light

On 6 November 2010, Mona Aly organised a storytelling performance using original stories produced during the Ana el-Hekkeya workshop held in July 2010.

The stories were based on case studies from the Middle East Hub: Mulki Al-Sharmani’s research on khul (no fault divorce) and Hania Sholkamy’s research on feminist social protection. The performance entitled “Waiting for the Light” was held in Oriental Hall at the AUC campus and directed by Caroline Khalil, with original music composed by Iman Saleh el-Din.

Quotes

"We need to complicate the picture. That's why I like Pathways - because you ask daring questions"
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Consortium Advisory Group Member

"Pathways gave me the opportunity to be part of a learning process in which I was able to complicate and enrich my understanding of concepts and terms that are important to both academics and policymakers who are concerned with women's rights, gender justice, and feminists. What I have in mind are terms like empowerment of women, equality, the very category of women, women's rights, and of course gender.

What being part of an international research program contributed to my learning process are several things: 1) I had the opportunity through several conference meetings, workshops, collaborative writing projects to have meaningful and insightful discussions with other colleagues in the RPC about our understandings and findings, 2) I had the opportunity to do field research over a reasonably good period of time about different actors and domains that are involved with the issue of legal empowerment of Egyptian women, and 3) I had the ability to learn from this research, discuss the preliminary findings at different stages with other colleagues in the RPC in the region as well as in other geographical areas, and therefore 4) our conversation and learning process, I felt at least for me, was one that was dynamic and evolving all the time." Mulki Al-Sharmani, Social Research Center, Cairo

"The Stories for Change Workshop introduced me to a new teaching technique. This is an excellent and imaginative way of releasing/expressing individual creativity even as the terms of the exercise compel investigation of the different aspects/factors of women’s oppression. This was evidenced in Ghana and later in Lahore at Simorgh’s Stories for Change Workshop where it once again proved to be an enjoyable and seemingly unstressed way of critically examining patriarchal systems and structures.", Neelam Hussain, Simorgh Women's Resource and Publication Centre, Lahore