Rema Hammami

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Birzeit University

Rema Hammami is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University where she founded the graduate program in Gender and Development in 1998, the first graduate program in gender studies in the region. Her publications cover issues of development, politics, spatialities and gender in the context of Palestine. She serves on the editorial boards of the Arab Studies Journal, Jerusalem Quarterly File, Middle East Reports, Development and Change, and American Ethnologist. Founder and former chair of the Birzeit University Right to Education Campaign and founder and former director of the Women’s Affairs Centre in Gaza, she is active on issues of academic freedom and gender justice in and for Palestine. Recent publications include: “On (not) Suffering at the Checkpoint; Palestinian Narrative Strategies of Surviving Israel’s Carceral Geography”Borderlands Journal (14:1, 2015) and: “Precarious Politics: The Activism of ‘Bodies that Count’ (aligning with those that don’t) in Palestine’s Colonial Frontier” in. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (eds), Rethinking Vulnerability: Towards a Feminist Theory of Resistance and Agency, Durham, NC. Duke University Press, (forthcoming 2016). Her current research focuses on the interface between liberal peace building/ neo-humanitarian intervention and the logics of Israeli military occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza with a particular emphasis on how the aid industry deploys gender in its techniques across Palestine’s fragmented geo-political projects and spaces. Selected as a Carnegie Centennial Scholar at Columbia University in 2014, she was also previously awarded the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at the ISS (the Hague) for 2005 and currently serves on the jury of their awards for culture and development.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, Project Director