Ingrid Jaradat Gassner
Ingrid Jaradat Gassner is a co-founder and former director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (Badil). She has worked extensively in the fields of international law and advocacy, including innovative research on Palestinian refugees, the right to return, Israeli colonialism and apartheid and related third-state responsibilities. She has also coordinated research for a Palestinian civic initiative seeking to register exiled Palestinians as voters and campaign for direct PNC elections and carried out advocacy with the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem. She currently works as an independent consultant.
Irene Calis
Irene Calis is a de-colonial scholar, educator, and organizer in the department of Critical Race, Gender, & Culture Studies at American University, DC, where she is also the Director of Arab World Studies. Her research and activism, grounded in the Palestinian liberation struggle, focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of everyday life. Her current work on emancipatory futures situates the Palestinian struggle in a wider conversation with the global South, and in particular with indigenous-settler experience and intellectual thought. Calis holds a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Ismail Khalidi
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ismail Khalidi’s writing on Palestinian history, culture and politics range from plays and poetry to op-eds and commentary. He holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and authored the award-winning play Tennis in Nablus, which explores the Palestinians’ 1936-39 revolt against British Colonial rule. His work has been produced and read at theatres and Universities around the country including Atlanta’s Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre, which premiered Tennis in Nablus, and the Culture Project, which will produce the New York premiere in 2013. Khalidi’s writing has also appeared in The Daily Beast, American Theatre Magazine, The Nation, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Hanna Alshaikh
Al-Shabaka Member Hanna Alshaikh is an adjunct professor at DePaul University, teaching courses on political Islam, the intersections of religion and politics in the Middle East, and Islamic thought. Hanna is also a research fellow at the American Friends Service Committee, working on an oral history project on the Palestinian diasporic narrative, activism, immigration, and intergenerational issues. She holds a BA from DePaul University, where she double majored in Islamic World Studies and Arabic, and earned her MA from the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). Her research focused on social and intellectual history in the late Ottoman Palestine.
Hashem Abushama
Hashem Abushama graduated from Earlham College with a BA in Peace and Global Studies. In 2015, Abushama became a Youth Representative of Palestine Refugees at the United Nations. He was appointed as a Youth Ambassador to the UNRWA@65 Conference in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. At Earlham, Abushama served as the President of the Earlham Student Body. Recently, he has been selected as one of first two Rhodes Scholars from Palestine. While at the University of Oxford, Abushama hopes to pursue his graduate studies in International Development with a particular focus on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.
Hatem Bazian
Hatem Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and is also a visiting Professor in Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California and adviser to Berkeley’s Religion, Politics and Globalization Center as well as Academic Affairs Chair at Zaytuna College of California. He also founded Berkeley’s Center for the Study and Documentation of Islamophobia, a research unit dedicated to the systematic study of Othering Islam and Muslims. He is also Chairman of the Board of American Muslims for Palestine.
Hazem Abu Helal
Hazem Abu Helal is a political, social and human rights activist. He holds a BA in law from the University of Jerusalem and a higher diploma in NGO Management from Birzeit University. Hazem has contributed to founding a number of Palestinian civil institutions, youth groups and campaigns involved in political and social issues in Palestine and the Arab world. He has worked with several civil institutions on youth and education issues in Palestine and as a facilitator and trainer on gender, human rights, advocacy, and life skills for youth.
Hazem Jamjoum
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Hazem Jamjoum is a graduate student in Modern Middle East History at New York University. His writing has focused on political-economy approaches to Israeli colonialism and Palestinian elite formation, and critiques of partition-based conflict management “solutions,” among other areas.
Halah Ahmad
Halah Ahmad is a policy researcher, writer, and policy communications expert. Most recently, she led legislative affairs as VP for Policy at the Jain Family Institute, an applied social science research institute based in New York City. Halah also served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka, and has conducted strategic policy research for government agencies and NGOs in Greece, Albania, Germany, Palestine, and the US. Halah received her Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge University as a Harvard-Cambridge scholar. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vox, The LA Times, The Hill, USA Today and other outlets.
