Join us for the annual student choice lecture presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa:  Razan Ghazzawi, “Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography.”  From a positionality of an exiled protestor in Europe and a former political prisoner in Syria, this project traces the journeys of eight self-identified Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ artists, workers, performers, and refugees from their temporary exile locations in Lebanon to their refugee destinations in Europe. It explores the interlocutors’ temporal encounters with geographies of checkpoints and prisons in Syria and Lebanon, on one side, and racialized borders of Europe, on the other. This project investigates narratives of what Rima Hammami calls “carceral geographies” as well as surviving checkpoints, prisons, and asylum journeys from Syria and Lebanon to Europe. The talk will focus on one of the book’s chapters, which examines stories of navigating and surviving racialized borders as LGBTQ refugees of color, and how this experience is securitized and militarized; it will also explore emotional labor and care as affective forms of protest within the context of military carceral states in Syria and Lebanon as well as Europe’s “refugee crisis.”

Dr. Razan Ghazzawi (they/them/هي\هن) is an award-winning human rights defender, former political prisoner, and recovering blogger. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A MESA Global Academy Fellow for 2024–2025, Ghazzawi’s work has appeared in ARTE, Al Jazeera English, The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. They are currently developing their first book monograph, an ethnographic study of sexuality politics in Syria and Lebanon that examines revolution, the “war on terror,” and the “refugee crisis” from south–south perspectives.

Co-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab Students Union. Lunch will be served during the talk.