Early Career Fellows (2021-2022)

Early Career Fellows (2021-2022)

The Early Career Fellows Program, previously known as Postdoctoral Fellowships Program, is a 12-month fellowship program aimed at enabling young researchers, up to three years out of the PhD, to pursue their research and publishing plans, become part of Arab research networks and plan a research career in the Arab region.

Fellowships are awarded competitively to junior scholars who are citizens or nationals of an Arab country and show high quality academic credentials and promise. The ACSS research fellow should be affiliated with a research institution in the Arab region during the period of the fellowship and should have an academic mentor at this institution.

2021-2022 Early Career Fellows

Below are the fellows in the 2021-2022 Cycle of the Early Career Fellows Program.

Zeina Al Azmeh

Postdoctoral Affiliation: Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Project Title: The Cost of Leaving: Syrian Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Revolution Under Globalisation

Country: Syria

Biography: Zeina Al Azmeh is a political sociologist whose work focuses on social movements and migration. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. Supervised by Prof Patrick Baert, her thesis examines the role of exiled Syrian intellectuals in the Syrian uprising (2011-2018). Before joining Cambridge, she worked and taught at Qatar University and the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus, Syria. Educated in Syria, Lebanon, the United States, and the United Kingdom, she has two master’s degrees in music composition and social and cultural theory. She is the author of a book on music theory in the Arabic language and several peer-reviewed articles in cultural sociology and the sociology of education.

Diaa Barghouti

Postdoctoral Affiliation: Abdelmalek Essaadi University

Project Title: Indigenous Sufi Theatre in Tunisia: Performance, Epistemology, and the Legacy of Islamic Intellectual History in Contemporary Sufi Culture

Country: Palestine

Biography: Diaa Barghouti holds a BA from Brown University and an MA and a PhD in Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the indigenous performance traditions of North Africa, exploring how Tunisian Sufi rituals can create new avenues for theatrical experimentation. Her work also stresses the relevance of Islamic intellectual history to contemporary Sufi rituals practices, specifically the writings of the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. She has also experimented with the Sufi modes of performance derived from her research on Sufi ritual through her own artistic practice as a playwright. She is also interested in Sufi festivals in Palestine and contemporary theatre performances that draw on indigenous sources. Her plays have been performed at Ashtar Theatre, the SIN Festival of Video and Performance Art, and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. Her work on theatre and Sufism has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly and Jadaliyya.

Mahjouba Kaoukaou

Postdoctoral Affilition: Ibn Tofail University

Project Title: Digital religious authority: a study of the impact of digital religious content on the religious identities of social media users in Morocco

Country: Morocco

Biography: Professor of Philosophy at the Regional Center for the Professions of Education and Training of Rabat-Kenitra region. She graduated as Valedictorian in Philosophy from the Ecole Normale Supérieure – Meknes, and holds an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences - Mohammed V University. She works in the field of social media sociology, and the sociology of religions. Her relevant publications in peer-reviewed journals include: “The Virtual Social Network Paradigm: Towards a Reshaping of the Sociology Field and Its Domains” (2019) published in “The Researchers” journal; an article entitled: “Digital Non-Religious Identity and the Concept of the E-Family: A Netnographic Study of the E-Secular Link” published inthe “Hespéris - Tamuda ” journal (2020); and a study entitled “Moroccan Jews in the Digitally Documented Imaginary: A Socio-Netnographic Study of the Religious Representations of  Facebook Moroccans”, published “Believers Without Borders” (2021).  She also works on the digital space-related methodology and has published a relevant study entitled “The Virtual Society and the Dilemma of Renewing the Sociological Research Method: Towards Building a Computer-Assisted Model for Studying Electronic Interactions” (2019) in the “Omran” journal.

Hadil Karkar

Postdoctoral Affiliation: Birzeit University

Project Title: Landscapes of Muted Sensibilities

Country: Palestine

Biography: Hadeel Karkar holds a Ph.D. in General and Comparative Literature from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 in France. She did her Master degree in English Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and her Bachelor degree in English Language and Literature at Birzeit University. Dr. Karkar holds a temporary lecturer-researcher position at Université Grenoble Alpes. She is a comparatist specialised in Anglophone literature, civilisations and empires. She taught English language, and Anglophone literature and civilisations at universities in South Africa, Palestine and France. Her research tackles the construction of narrative in settler-colonial contexts where she presents novel paradigms for the analysis and criticism of settler-colonial texts. She worked extensively on Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi. Dr. Karkar also served as a consultant on Arab culture at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. She was the editor for children’s and adolescents’ books at Tamer Institute.