Anaheed Al-Hardan

Anaheed Al-Hardan
Born
💼 Occupation
Title	Associate professor

Anaheed Al-Hardan is an associate professor of sociology at Howard University. Previously, she was an assistant professor of sociology at American University of Beirut. Her 2016 book, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities, was a joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards.

Background and education

Al-Hardan's family was expelled from Umm az-Zinat in 1948. She describes herself as "a granddaughter of the Nakba."

Al-Hardan received a Master of Arts in Near and Middle Eastern Studies in 2006 from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

In 2008, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Palestinian American Research Center.

She received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Sociology in 2011 from Trinity College Dublin.

Her favorite novel is Atfal al-Nada ("Children of the Dew") by Mohammed al-Asaad, which she credits for starting the journey that led to her 2016 book, Palestinians in Syria.

Career

From 2011 until 2014, Al-Hardan was a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

From 2014 until 2022, she was Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at American University of Beirut.

In 2017, she was a visiting fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Free University of Berlin.

In 2018, she was a visiting fellow in the Bandung Humanisms Initiative at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. The same year, she was also the Arcapita Visiting Professor of Modern Arab Studies at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, where she taught a graduate course entitled "The Decolonial Turn and West Asia".

Since 2019, she has served as Principal Investigator on Afro-Asian Futures Past, a decolonization collaborative research program between Howard University, the American University of Beirut, the University of Ghana, Cape Town University, and the University of the Witwatersrand, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Since 2020, she has been a visiting researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.

Since 2022, she has worked as an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University.

She is a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network and an advisory board member of the Palestinian Oral History Archive.

Research

Al-Hardan researches colonialism and resistance about counter-memory, anti-colonialism, and south-south thought in the Global South. She has previously written about activism in the Palestinian right of return movement, critical research methods in Palestine studies, and Palestinian intellectual history. Her forthcoming book is expected to examine Palestinian and Arab anti-colonial theory within the context of south-south philosophies of liberation and decolonization in Africa and Asia.

Decolonizing Research on Palestinians

Al-Hardan's 2014 paper in Qualitative Inquiry, "Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practices", argues that some post-1948 scholarship about the Nakba has been "part and parcel of the historical and contemporary colonizing power/knowledge nexus" that has tried to prevent the Palestinian right of return. In the paper, she examines why New Historians gained academic attention while Palestinian oral histories -- which differed from the documents in the Israel State Archives that the New Historians examined -- were marginalized.

Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought

In "Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought", published in 2015 in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Al-Hardan argues that the material and symbolic realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli-Arab conflict have influenced changes in the way historians understand the Nakba. She explains in the paper that after the First Intifada and Second Intifada, the memory of the Nakba changed from being about the defeat of a Pan-Arab coalition in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to being about an ongoing, indefinite system of Israeli rule in Palestine.

In describing the ongoing Nakba in "Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought", Al-Hardan points to the continued building of Israeli settlements and the 2014 Gaza War. In the paper, Al-Hardan notes that while research interest in the Nakba has fluctuated over time, the Nakba has remained a constant for the survivors of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and their descendants. She warns against conflating historians' "discursive reading" of the evolution of the meaning of Nakba with Palestinians' memories of it.

Palestinians in Syria

In 2016, Al-Hardan published Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press), which was a joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards. The book was reviewed in Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Islamic Studies, and Memory Studies.

Al-Hardan's research for the book included 63 Arabic-language interviews conducted during a six-month trip to Syria in 2008. In 2016, she gave a lecture at Princeton University, hosted by the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice and the American University of Beirut Collaborative Initiative, discussing the findings from the book. In 2020, the book was translated into Arabic and published in Beirut by the Institute for Palestine Studies.

Selected works

• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2008). "Understanding the present through the past: Between British and Israeli discourses on Palestine". In Lentin, Ronit. Thinking Palestine. Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-84277-906-4. Search this book on
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2011). "The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives". British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 38 (2): 284–286. doi:10.1080/13530194.2011.581834. ISSN 1353-0194.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2012). "The Right of Return Movement in Syria: Building a Culture of Return, Mobilizing Memories for the Return". Journal of Palestine Studies. 41 (2): 62–79. doi:10.1525/jps.2012.XLI.2.62. ISSN 0377-919X.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2014). "Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practices". Qualitative Inquiry. 20 (1): 61–71. doi:10.1177/1077800413508534. ISSN 1077-8004.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2015). "Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought". Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 35 (3): 622–638. doi:10.1215/1089201x-3426457. ISSN 1089-201X.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2016). Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities. Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/al-h17636. ISBN 978-0-231-54122-0. Search this book on
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2017). "Memories for the Return? Remembering the Nakba by the First Generation of Palestinian Refugees in Syria". Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. 16 (2): 177–192. doi:10.3366/hlps.2017.0164. ISSN 2054-1988.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2018). "The sociological canon reconfigured: Empire, colonial critique, and contemporary sociology". International Sociology. 33 (5): 545–557. doi:10.1177/0268580918791967. ISSN 0268-5809.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2022). "Empires, Colonialism, and the Global South in Sociology". Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 51 (1): 16–27. doi:10.1177/00943061211062959a. ISSN 0094-3061.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (2022). "Sociology Revised: W. E. B. Du Bois, Colonialism, and Anticolonial Social Theory". In Morris, Aldon. The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois. Oxford Academic. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190062767.013.50. ISBN 9780190062767. Search this book on

References

This article "Anaheed Al-Hardan" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Anaheed Al-Hardan. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Mary Target
• Anthony Thomas (businessman)
• Oscar Wilde
• Rysa Saujani
• Peter Browne (priest)
• Michal Kolesár
• Paul Ururuka

---