The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?

On Thursday April 2, 2026, Professor Shahrzad Mojab will give a Doing Gender Lecture entitled The Making of Gender and the Writing of Defiance: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance.

This lecture is jointly organized by the Contesting Governance Platform, the Gender, Diversity and Global Justice Platform and the NOG.

The Doing Gender Lecture series for 2025-2026 will be framed around the theme of Feminist Solidarity in Times of War.

Lecture: The Making of Gender and the Writing of Defiance: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance

Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance (2024, edited by Shahrzad Mojab) is a study of the lives and struggles of Kurdish women in the past while also envisioning the social, cultural, and sexual transformation of gender relations for a future that is upon us.
An interdisciplinary study of, by, and with Kurdish women, this anthology offers a renewed radical analysis of transnational feminism by focusing on the interrelations between social forces and structures that constitute the totality of gender relations in Kurdish society spanning local, regional, and global contexts.

The anthology delves into stories of daily encounters of women’s bodies and sexualities with the state, patriarchal relations, religion, borders, and refugee camps. Some chapters explore the voices, images, and writings of women in cinema, songs, poems, folktales, and memoirs. The collective feminist ethos of the book is directed towards overcoming the absences and omissions of Kurdish gender relations in Kurdish Studies and in the study of women and gender relations in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA).

Biography
Shahrzad Mojab is a scholar, teacher, and activist, and is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women’s work and learning. She is Professor Emerita of Education and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the former Director of Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity and the Women and Gender Institute, University of Toronto.
Shahrzad’s research and teaching focus on the theorization of Marxism and feminism; intersectionality; capitalist imperialist patriarchy; and the revolts of women, students and nationalities in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA). She has published extensively on these topics, and they have mostly been translated into Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, French, Swedish, and German.

Her books include: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance (edited, 2024); Marxism and Migration (co-edited with Genevie Ritchie and Sara Carpenter, 2022); Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (co-authored with Amir Hassanpour, 2021); Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (co-authored with Sara Carpenter, 2017); Youth as/in Crisis: Young People, Public Policy, and the Politics of Learning (co-edited with Sara Carpenter, 2017); Marxism and Feminism (editor, 2015); Educating from Marx: Race, Gender and Learning (co-edited with Sara Carpenter, 2012); Women, War, Violence, and Learning (editor, 2010); Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (c-edited with Himani Bannerji and Judith Whitehead, 2001); and Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (editor, 2001).

A unique feature of Shahrzad’s work is making knowledge accessible to public using arts such as storytelling, dance, drama, painting and documentary film. She collaborates with artists to aesthetically enliven the result of her research. Her dance projects include No Woman’s Land (2019, with Roshanak Jaberi and Doris Rajan), Behind the Stained Wall (2010, with Roshanak Jaberi).
Her documentary films are: Guerrilla Archive (2025), Dancing for Change: Kurdish Women of Iran (2015). Talking Prison, Creating Art and Making Justice (2010), Samjana: Memoirs and Resistance (2007).

In 2023 she created and curated The Archive of Defiance that is an aesthetically inspired resource for transnational feminist teaching, research, and activism. Selected visual materials representing the movement of Woman, Life, Freedom/Jin, Jian, Azadi in Iran is curated based on the art forms, and where necessary a brief description of the content, artists’ names, place, date, and time is provided. Revolutionary feminist ‘defiance’ constitutes the core theoretical, political, and pedagogical anchor of this archive.

Doing Gender Lecture by Prof. Shahrzad Mojab

Thursday April 2, 2026
Lecture: The Making of Gender and the Writing of Defiance: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance.
Time: 17:15 – 18:45 hrs.
Location: Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, room 0.06
Chair: Sandra Ponzanesi
Respondants: Marlene Schäfers and Shokhan Mohammed Fatah
Registration: registration is appreciated. Send an email to nog@uu.nl

Background reading: (PDF available upon request):

  • Benson-Sokmen, Susan. 2024.  Chapter “Revolutionary Pasts and the Authoritarian Present: Women, Memory, and Resistance in Kurdistan.” In: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture and Resistance, edited by Shahrzad Mojab, p. 123-147. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.
  • Mojab, Shahrzad. 2024. Chapter “Figures of Dissent: Women’s Memoirs of Defiance.” In: Remembering and memorializing violence: Transnational feminist reflections, edited by A. Crosby & H. Evans, p. 105-118. Rutgers University Press.

Please note that RMA and PhD students can get 1 ECTS from the NOG for attending this Doing Gender Lecture, the interactive seminar Women Who Resist: Narratives of Defiance Across Borders with Shokhan Mohammed Fatah and Shahrzad Mojab (April 2, 10-12 hrs) and the film screening of Guerrilla Archive (April 1).