Dr Kanwal Hameed

RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow
Dr Kanwal Hameed

Dr Kanwal Hameed

RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, April - July 2024

Home Institution: Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS), University of Exeter

I am an inter-disciplinary historian with a background in Middle East Studies, and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Mapping Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East project. After receiving my PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) University of Exeter in 2022, I was a Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut. 

My research interests include modern histories of the Gulf and MENA regions, critical historiography, gender studies and political movements. Through my work I explore worldmaking, focussing on mid-20th century national, anti-colonial, and leftist movements in the Gulf. I am developing work on an intergenerational radical tradition in Bahrain and Kuwait, looking at the shifting iterations of local, national, and regional liberation within it, and their engagement with a global third world rising.

Project title: Stretching Stuart Hall: Class, Race, Ethno-sect and Nation

This project is a preliminary investigation into the modern historical trajectory and continued salience of ethno-sectarianism and citizenship as a system of meaning in the Gulf / Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It references the particular history and world-shaping effects of enslavement, dispossession and colonialism addressed in the work of Stuart Hall, while taking the novel approach of thinking about ethno-sect and citizenship as Hall’s politically animated discursive categories. In doing so, it stretches Stuart Hall’s thinking on race and articulation towards the context of socio-economic and communal relations in the modern Gulf. This research draws on existing works on contingent relationships between class, ethno-sect and racialised colonial and state structures in the MENA region (Hanna Batatu, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi, Mahdi Amel, among others), and brings them into conversation with Hall’s theory of race as a ‘floating signifier’. 

This project contributes to knowledge production on the material histories of social communalities in the Gulf / MENA, and offers an alternative to the discourse of ancient sectarian hatred by situating the classification of social groups within a broader schema of colonial and racial capitalism.

 

Book chapters, peer reviewed journal articles, and policy papers:

  1. “Where Are the Revolutionary Women of West Asia and North Africa?” co-authored with Sara Salem, She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World", Eds. Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson, London (Pluto Press: 2023).
  2. “One Struggle, Many Fronts: The National Union of Kuwaiti Students and Palestine”, Eds. Sorcha Thompson & Pelle Olsen, International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982), London (IB Tauris: 2023). 
  3. “Toward a liberation pedagogy” co-authored with Katie Natanel and Amal Khalaf, Kohl Anticolonial Feminisms, January 2023. 
  4. “The Quiet Emergency: Experiences and Understandings of Climate Change in Kuwait.” Co-authored with Deen Shariff Sharp, Abrar Alshammari, Kuwait Programme Paper Series, LSE Middle East Centre (13) 2021. 

Media & Other Publications 

  1. [At Press] “Women in Bahrain and the Liberation of Palestine”, Solidarities Across Borders Series, History Workshop Digital Magazine, Spring 2024. 
  2. “Ayna Silah al-Naft al-‘Arabi?” (Where is the Arab Oil Weapon?), 11 Jannuary 2024, Al-Sifr. Eds. Mohammed Zbeeb and Viviane Akiki, accessible via: https://alsifr.org/gulfstates-normalization-israel
  3. "Tarikh al-'Amal wa Mas'ala-t al-Tabaqa: Dirasat Hala-t al-Kuwait" (Histories of Labour and Questions of Class: Case Study Kuwait), 8 August 2023, Al-Sifr. Eds. Mohammed Zbeeb and Viviane Akiki, accessible via: https://alsifr.org/labour-class-history-kuwait
  4. “Halwa, Mahyawa and Multiple Registers of Life in the Gulf”, Archive Stories, 20 July 2023. Eds. Mai Taha and Sara Salem, accessible via: https://archive-stories.com/Halwa-Mahyawa-and-Multiple- Registers-of-Life-in-the-Gulf.