Author notes
Azza Basarudin received her doctorate in women’s studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research centers on gender, sexuality, women’s activism, and cultural memory in communities of Muslims in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Basarudin has held fellowships and visiting scholar positions at Harvard University, Syracuse University, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and the American University of Cairo. She has received awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Her writings have appeared in A Jihad for Justice: Honoring the Work and Life of Amina Wadud, Women and Islam, Al-Raida: Journal of the Institute of Women’s Studies in the Arab World, Twentieth-Century Arab Writers, and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. She is currently a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women completing a book manuscript on Islam and feminist activism in Malaysia.
Khanum Shaikh received her doctorate in Women’s/Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her scholarship employs a transnational feminist framework to study the intersections between gender, religious agency, and geopolitics in the ongoing wars on terror with a focus on Pakistani Muslim communities. She has received numerous awards in support of her scholarship. In Fall 2013, she joined the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge, as an Assistant Professor. Shaikh has been a long-time resident/social justice advocate/teacher in the larger Los Angeles area. Prior to her life as an academic she worked on issues of domestic violence in South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, interethnic relations in Los Angeles public schools, reproductive justice for women of color in California, and violence against women of color in local/global contexts in general.
