In 2014, my colleagues at the Cairo-based Women and Memory Forum (WMF) and I decided to establish a women’s museum in Egypt. I was motivated by two things. The first was the absence of feminist narratives in museums in Egypt and across the Arab region. While Egypt hosts more than seventy museums, not a single one is dedicated to women’s history and only a handful of these museums are specialized biographical museums on famous women figures. The second was the expanding collections of archives and objects of material culture housed at WMF.
Continue reading ‘Doing Well, Don’t Worry’: Exhibiting Archives as a Feminist PracticeMonth: September 2021
#IchBinHanna: What next?
Since around the middle of June 2021, academics in Germany have been posting reports of their experiences and criticisms of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG) or German Law on Fixed-Term Contracts in Higher Education and Research1 under the Twitter hashtag #IchBinHanna.
Continue reading #IchBinHanna: What next?- This law limits the length of employment contracts for doctoral candidates to a maximum of six years before the completion of their dissertations, and for postdocs to a maximum of six years after completion of their dissertations. The vast majority of academics in Germany are employed on fixed-term contracts, often for only one or two years at a time, and even postdocs often have only a 50 per cent contract. Tenured posts hardly exist, so for many the only goal is to secure one of the increasingly rare full professorships. [↩]