Nadia Barhoum
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nadia Barhoum is a research associate at UC Berkeley where she works on issues of political ecology and climate adaptability, data visualization, structural inequality, and spatial politics within marginalized communities. She previously worked as the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch and as an Advocacy Officer with a local NGO in East Jerusalem. She completed her BA in Political Economy at UC Berkeley and her MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths College at the University of London. Nadia has been active in youth organizing within transnational Palestinian communities and is a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Mjriam Abu Samra
Mjriam Abu Samra is a doctoral researcher in International Relations at the University of Oxford, UK. Her work focuses on Palestinian Transnational Student Movements and their contribution to the broader Liberation Movement through different political periods. She had previously completed her Masters in Middle East Politics at SOAS in London. Recently, Mjriam has been based in Amman, Jordan, where she is completing her research. She has lectured at the University of Jordan Faculty of Politics and International Studies. Mjriam has been a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Association “Wael Zuaiter” in Rome, Italy, and of the transnational Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).
May Seikaly
May Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University in the Department of Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Near Eastern Studies). Her work has focused on the social history of Arab society, specifically Palestinian and Arabian Gulf societies. May Seikaly has been involved in the collection and archiving of Palestinian memory through the use of Oral documentation for recording, archiving and historicizing oral collections, including her book Haifa: Transformation of an Arab society 1918-1939. She is currently working on a study of Gulf Social History through the eyes of its women, and in essence again utilizing oral history as a major tool.
Mayssun Succarie
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mayssun Succarie is a postdoctoral scholar in the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. Her research covers the Political Culture of Development in the Global South with a focus on the Arab region. She taught for three years at the American University of Beirut in the departments of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies as well as the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. In 2012, she was the ARCAPITA visiting Professor at the Middle East, South Asia and African Studies-MESAAS at Columbia University. Mayssun has a doctorate in Anthropology and Education from the University of California, Berkeley.
Maureen Ali
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Maureen Ali, former cultural editor of The Middle East magazine, is a writer and film-maker based in Beirut. She is the editor of the book “A Lost Summer,” a compilation of blogs, texts and other writings about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon and wrote the texts for “Watercolors,” a campaigning book by photographer Mazen Jannoun about the state of the Lebanese coast. She is an active member of Inaash, Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps, Beirut.
Mariam Barghouti
Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer and researcher based in Ramallah. She earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Birzeit University, and an MSc in Sociology and Global Change from the University of Edinburgh. She worked as a journalist and reporter with a focus on the Levant, and published various sociopolitical commentaries from Palestine. She has undertaken monitoring and evaluation missions of humanitarian and development aid in Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon for various governmental and non-governmental organizations. Her reporting and analysis have been featured in Al-Jazeera English, the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, and Middle East Eye, amongst others.
Mariam Al-Mozian
Al-Shabaka policy member Mariam Al-Mozian lives in Gaza and holds a PhD in Political Science from the Institute of Arab Research and Studies. She previously worked as media officer at the General Union of Palestinian Women and as an adjunct professor at Al-Quds Open University in Rafah. Her work specializes in assessing civil society institutions’ programs and their suitability for the Palestinian context, including research on the role of civil society institutions in empowering young women leaders.
Majd Kayyal
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Majd Kayyal was born in Haifa in 1990 to a displaced family from Barwa village. He studied philosophy and political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kayyal writes for Al-Safir’s supplement printed in Beirut. He has published political and literary articles in several publications and newspapers, and has maintained a personal blog since 2010. His first novel, “The Tragedy of Mr. Matar,” won the Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer Award for 2015.
Maisa Shquier
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Maisa Shquier is an activist and D.Phil candidate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex/UK. Her ethnographic research investigates the intersection between gender, sexuality, nation, body politics and embodiment. Specifically, it examines the gendered and sexualized representations of Palestine, through a discourse analysis of the “New Historians” and the visual images of Palestine. She has 10 years of development experience with local and International NGOs in monitoring and evaluating projects in gender, disability, health, food security, water and sanitation and civil society. She has worked on policy formation on gender, disability, sexuality, masculinity, and women’s political participation in the Middle East.
