Asmaa Abu Mezied
Asmaa Abu Mezied is an economic development and social inclusion specialist working with Oxfam to address issues of gender, development, and climate change in the agriculture sector. Her research interests focus on the care economy, women’s collectives organizing in economic sectors, the private sector’s social accountability, and the intersection of Palestinian political, agricultural, and environmental identities. She served as Al-Shabaka’s 2022 Visiting Gaza Fellow and was previously an Atlas Corps Fellow in partnership with President Obama Emerging Global Leaders, a Gaza Hub-Global Shaper (an initiative of World Economic Forum), and a 2021 Mozilla Foundation Wrangler at “Tech for Social Activism” space.
Anaheed Al-Hardan
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Anaheed Al-Hardan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut. She is an advisory board member of the Palestinian Oral History Archive. Her research on right of return movement activism, critical research methods in Palestine studies and Palestinian intellectual history has appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Qualitative Inquiry and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently undertaking a new book-based research project on Palestinian and Arab decolonial theory within the context of south-south philosophies of liberation and decolonization.
Ameer Makhoul
Ameer Makhoul has served for many years as General Director of ittijah – Union of Arab Community Based Associations, the largest coalition of civil society organizations among the Palestinian citizens of Israel. He has also chaired the National committee for the Protection of Political Freedoms, and served as coordinator of the Coordinating Committee of Palestinian Civil Society in the Homeland and Diaspora. He writes frequently on human rights issues and his political analysis is widely circulated.
Amal Nazzal
Dr. Amal Nazzal is Assistant Professor at the Business and Economics Faculty at Birzeit University, Palestine. She received her PhD from the University of Exeter, where she studied the relevance of Bourdieu’s theory of practice for relationally capturing various practices, mechanisms, and dynamics in socio-cultural organizations. In particular, she focused on politically-motivated social movements. She has also researched social capital, social networking theory, digital ethnography, and social media content analysis. She has worked closely with the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) and 7amleh – the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media.
Ahmad Diab
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and Fulbright scholar. He is currently working on his PhD at New York University. His interests lie in the intersection between literature, film, and power structures.
Aimee Shalan
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Aimee Shalan is Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). She was formerly Director of Fobzu (Friends of Birzeit University), a UK-based charity supporting the right to education for Palestinians, and Co-founder and Director of Pressure Cooker Arts, a not-for-profit arts and advocacy organisation. Before that she was Director of Advocacy at MAP and Head of Education at the Council for Arab British Understanding. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian and has written for a variety of media outlets. She taught at City University and Queen Mary, University of London, and has a doctorate in the Politics of Palestinian Literature.
Ahmad Barclay
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Barclay is an architect and environmental designer presently based in Beirut. He is co-founder of arenaofspeculation.org, and also works on Visualizing Palestine and #3awda. Ahmad previously worked with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) on the “Laboratory of Returns” project, investigating architectural models for the return of Palestinian refugees. His academic research has focused on the potentials of architecture and planning as tools of ‘spatial resistance‘ in the Palestinian struggle.
Abir Kopty
Al-Shabaka policy member Abir Kopty, holds an MA in Political Communication from the City University, London, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include power dynamics in online communities and the use of social media networks for social and political activism.
Abdullah Al-Arian
Abdullah Al-Arian is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, where he specializes in the modern Middle East and the study of Islamic social movements. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. Twitter: @anhistorian
