This article explores the author's personal and professional challenges as a feminist and the strategies employed to address them. It focuses on the interplay of knowledge production, positionality, and ethical considerations in contexts of conflict and trauma, and it explores the complexities of intertwining personal experiences with academic inquiry. After highlighting personal struggles of navigating two worlds, the author emphasizes the importance of a reflexive and ethical approach in feminist research that involves navigating power relations and positionality, managing expectations, and responding to the needs on the ground. It ends with addressing both a personal backlash the author experienced and critiques directed toward feminist work in the region. Drawing on her experiences in conducting PhD research with Kurdish women refugees in the UK, postdoctoral research on women survivors of the Anfal genocide in Kurdistan, and a comparative analysis of the experiences of women survivors of the Anfal and Yezidi genocides, the article provides insights into the intricate landscape of feminist research in challenging contexts.
Twenty Years of Feminist Engagement: Reflections on Practice
Choman Hardi is an educator, author, and gender studies pioneer in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies which initiated the first gender studies minor in Iraq. She is the author of critically acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, her postdoctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (2004), have been studied by secondary school students as part of their general curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2017, a selection of her poems was published in Italian. In 2020, Considering the Woman was released in a French translation. Her translation of Sherko Bekas's Butterfly Valley (2018) won a PEN Translates Award, and she is a recipient of the 2023 Franco-German Human Rights Prize. Whispering Walls, her debut novel, was published in 2023.
Choman Hardi; Twenty Years of Feminist Engagement: Reflections on Practice. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 2024; 123 (4): 711–730. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11381057
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