2023 - 2024 Speaker Series

Imagining new possibilities with feminist and queer resistance

Understanding the complex interplay of race, class, sexuality, gender, and colonial-imperial legacies is the cornerstone to building more just and equitable futures. The 2023-2024 Greeley Peace Scholar Program seeks to illuminate emerging trends and foster meaningful dialogues with scholars, activists, and artists leading the charge in feminist and queer resistance globally. Through these dialogues, we aspire to explore the transformative potential of feminist and queer resistance as it shapes diverse fields such as the creative arts, disability justice, labor organizing, policy advocacy, abolition, and beyond. This year-long series of events will culminate in the 2024 Greeley Scholar visit, featuring Professor Fatemeh Shams, an Iranian literary scholar, poet, and intersectional feminist activist. Currently, Professor Shams serves as Associate Professor of Persian literature and gender studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Monday, April 8, 2024
2-4 p.m., EST
Lowell TeleMedia Center
Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center
246 Market Street, Lowell, MA 01852

Parking is available in the HCID Parking Facility or the Leo A. Roy Parking Garage nearby.

How do Palestinian refugees manage the heavy toll political prison takes on young and old under Israeli occupation? Through observational footage and interviews filmed over 6 years in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, Degrees of Incarceration (co-produced by Nidal Al-Azraq) introduces audiences to a close network of family and friends, revealing that prison does not only affect those behind bars. Please join us for a film screening followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, Prof. Amahl Bishara.

This event is free and open to the public.

Register for Degrees of Incarceration – Film Screening & Conversation with Amahl Bishara

Amahl Bishara, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford 2022), about different conditions of expression for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. She also writes about popular refugee politics in the West Bank. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013), is an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian Intifada. She is the president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association.

This event is sponsored by the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley Fellowship for Peace Studies at UMass Lowell and the Lowell TeleMedia Center.

For questions or more information please email: Urmitapa_Dutta@uml.edu.

Don't Mobilize My Grief: American Jews in Solidarity with Palestinians

Dean’s Speaker Series | College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Atalia Omer, Ph.D.

Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School of Global Affairs
University of Notre Dame

Wednesday, February 7, 2024
11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., EST
University Crossing 260A
220 Pawtucket St, Lowell, MA 01854

In this talk, Prof. Omer will contextualize the current moment of Jewish mobilization against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Based on empirical and ethnographic research, the talk will illuminate why (mostly young) American Jews reassess the conflation of their Jewish identity with the policies of a nation-state and why they call with outrage: "Not in my Name."

This event is free and open to the public.

Register for Don't Mobilize My Grief: American Jews in Solidarity with Palestinians

About Atalia Omer

Atalia Omer is a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies Professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a senior fellow and Dermot TJ Dunphy Visiting Professor at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life program. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in the publication of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

This event is sponsored by the Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies Program and the College of Fine Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.

For questions or more information please email: Urmitapa_Dutta@uml.edu.

Sovereignty as an act of simultaneous unconditional love and resistance

Paola Balla

Wednesday, November 15, 2023
6-7 p.m., EST
Remote via Zoom

For the first of the 2023-2024 Scholar for Peace Studies speaker series, Paola Balla will speak on "Sovereignty as an act of simultaneous unconditional love and resistance". Paola Balla is an artist, curator, speaker, educator, and cultural producer. She developed Footscray Community Arts Centre’s first Indigenous Arts and Cultural program. Her work is driven by social justice, addressing impacts of colonial heteropatriarchal trauma, and creating spaces of healing through creative practice.

All are invited.

For questions or more information please email: Urmitapa_Dutta@uml.edu.