Description
Glendon College’s Race and Equity Caucus (CERREC) is organizing an event bringing together scholars and activists working on Islamophobia and its multifaceted manifestations in Francophone communities within Canada and beyond.
In the context of France, and more recently, in Quebec, political discourse, popular representations and legislation targeting Muslim communities have been called for in the name of ‘laïcité’ -secularism, and national - cultural cohesion and integrity.
By bringing together anti-racist scholars and activists from various disciplines, professional sectors and geographies, this event will trouble the notion of ‘exceptionalism’ of these contextual cases and foster an important dialogue between anglophone and francophone audiences as well as between academia and activist circles/communities.
Exchanges will shed light on underlying historical processes and contemporary issues which have created the set of intertwined political, economic, and cultural / ideational realities resulting in the multifaceted anti-Muslim racisms we are facing today in Quebec and France and allow participants to better understand resistance and struggles against Islamophobia.
The panelists will be: PhD Candidate (ABD) Roshan Arah Jahangeer, Dr. Houda Asal, Dr. Leila Benhadjoudja, PhD Candidate Liza Hammar, and Afrofeminist Activist Ndella Paye Diouf. The round-table will be moderated by Dr. Leila Benhadjoudja.
Short bios of the panelists are provided below:
Ndella Paye Diouf defines herself as an afrofeminist, intersectional, decolonial, radical.
She has fought against the law baning Muslim girls wearing the hijab from French schools. She is a founding member of "Le collectif Mamans Toutes Égales" (Mothers all equal), fighting against the exclusion of Muslim mothers wearing the hijab from schools outings.
She lives in London since 2015.
Liza Hammar has a Master’s degree in literary research focusing on post and decolonial feminist poetry from the extreme contemporary (Université de Lorraine, France). She is currently a PhD student in literary studies (Université du Québec à Montréal). Her doctoral research consists in rethinking poetry in times of crisis, mobilized by women, racialized people and queer people, 20th-21st centuries. Her research is part of feminist and decolonial studies. Liza Hammar is also a feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist. She co-founded "Ntra Rajel?" : a feminist and decolonial collective interested in the specificities of North African women and gender minorities in France.
Roshan Arah Jahangeer is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Canada, and an Instructor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on the transnational circulation of anti-veiling laws between France and Quebec, in the context of secularism, feminism, and islamophobia. Her research foregrounds (settler-)colonialism, intersectionality, religion, race, and gender.
Houda Asal holds a PhD in socio-history. Her doctoral thesis was published in English : "Identifying as Arab in Canada - A Century of Immigration History" (2020, Fernwood publishing). She was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal and associate of the Maurice Halbwachs Center at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her work focuses on immigration, social movements, racism and islamophobia in France and Canada. Houda has published more than 15 articles and book chapters and given talks to a wide variety of audiences on these topics. As a researcher at the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse of Quebec, she conducted a major study of xenophobic and islamophobic hate acts in the province (2019). Her last articles analyses the phenomenon of Islamophobia in France ("L'islamophobie en France, le déni d'un phénomène bien réel", in Racismes de France, 2020; "From Separatism to Islamophobia", Qalqalah, 2022 : https://qalqalah.org/en/essays/from-islamophobia-to-separatis).
Leila Benhadjoudja est féministe antiraciste, et travaille comme professeure adjointe à l'Institut d'études féministes et de genre à l'Université d'Ottawa. Ses recherches s'intéressent au racisme et l'antiracisme au Québec, l'islamophobie et les résistances féministes et antiracistes. Elle est aussi maman, cofondatrice du Festival Féministe à Ottawa et membre du BIPOC caucus de l'Université d'Ottawa.
The event will be bilingual: presentations will be in French or English and the Q&A and discussion will be held in both languages.