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Equality for Woman Lecture Series.

The ‘Equality for Women’ lecture series aims to draw attention to the issues facing women in the region and to contextualize the socioeconomic and political circumstances within which they have developed. The series will include two lectures each Fall and Spring semester to discuss the different aspects of how conflict and culture affects and shapes the lives of women in the region.

Dr. Nazand Begikhani is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She has over 20 years’ experience in research, writing, advocacy for human rights and consultancy, publishing widely on gender and ethnicity, violence against women and honour-based violence (HBV) in English, Kurdish and French. She addressed, among many conferences, the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN’s meeting with the World March of Women 2000, and Sweden’s International Conference on Honour Killings (2004). She has provided expert advice and training on gender equality and HBV to government bodies, UN agencies, and international organisations, including the Swedish government, the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq, UN Women in Iraq, the UK Metropolitan Police and Amnesty International. She previously sat on the High Commission to Monitor Violence Against Women in Kurdistan, and is currently a senior international advisor to Kurdistan Region’s Prime Minister on higher education and gender, and a member of the Kurdistan’s Women’s Rights Monitoring Board. Dr Begikhani is a poet of international renown with five poetry collections in Kurdish and one in English, Bells of Speech (Ambit, 2006). In 2000, she was awarded the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for her work on HBV, and, in 2012, the French Simone Landrey’s Feminine Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Le lendemain d’hier.  

 

The ‘Equality for Women’ lecture series aims to draw attention to the issues facing women in the region and to contextualize the socioeconomic and political circumstances within which they have developed. The series will include two lectures each Fall and Spring semester to discuss the different aspects of how conflict and culture affects and shapes the lives of women in the region. The first talk of the series was given by Dr. Choman Hardi, associate professor of English Literature at AUIS, on March 8, 2015. She spoke about the achievements of the women’s movement in Kurdistan, based on in-depth interviews with women in Kurdistan, as well as her own research on the Anfal campaign that she conducted during 2005-10. Dr. Choman Hardi is a celebrated poet, as well as a writer, translator, and a women’s rights activist. Her most recent publication, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Ashgate, 2011), was chosen by the Yankee Book Peddler as a UK Core Title. Listen to Dr. Hardi's lecture on women's movement in Kurdistan in the podcast below.  On May 3, 2015, Dr. Nazand Begikhani, senior research fellow at the University of Bristol, was invited to give the second lecture of the series. Her talk focused on the impact of the emerging global trends on the situation of women in Kurdistan, specifically on gender based violence. Dr. Begikhani has over 20 years’ experience in research, writing, advocacy for human rights and consultancy, publishing widely on gender and ethnicity, violence against women and honour-based violence (HBV) in English, Kurdish and French. She is currently a senior international advisor to Kurdistan Region’s Prime Minister on higher education and gender, and a member of the Kurdistan’s Women’s Rights Monitoring Board. In 2000, she was awarded the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for her work on HBV, and, in 2012, the French Simone Landrey’s Feminine Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Le lendemain d’hier. Listen to Dr. Begikhani's lecture on globalization and gender violence in the podcast below. 

 

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