“My role is to co-produce grounded analyses with activist comrades to expand the possibilities for coalition building and decolonial abolition. From Turtle Island to Palestine, I believe Indigenous studies approaches can especially disrupt the nationalist myths that rising fascist movements have been depending upon to mobilize their base.”
Nadine Naber is professor of Gender and Women’s Studies / Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, founder of Liberate Your Research, and cofounder of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS). She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of five books, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Arab and Arab American Feminisms ( Syracuse University Press, 2010); and She is coauthor of Beyond Erasure and Profiling: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland (IRRPP/UIC, 2022). Her forthcoming books are Pedagogies of the Radical Mother (Haymarket Books) and Social Movement Led Research (EtCH Collective). She is cofounder of UIC’s Arab American Cultural Center and the University of Michigan’s Arab and Muslim American Studies program. She is a board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Arab American Action Network and works with INCITE! Palestine Force and the Palestinian Feminist Collective Chicago.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
In Arab America, Nadine Naber explores the often misunderstood Arab American community, particularly post-9/11, by sharing the stories of second-generation Arab American young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of whom are political activists involved in two cultural movements: a Muslim global justice movement and a leftist Arab movement shaped by the conditions of diaspora.
This report examines the conditions and experiences of Arab Americans in the Chicagoland area through demographic research, surveys, focus groups, and expert commentary, analyzing the impact of systemic inequities and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism on their lives across employment, education, healthcare, housing, and policing, while addressing the dual challenge of being both hypervisible due to stereotypes and invisible due to classification as white and general societal ignorance.
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
