IOWC PhD Students
Sarah Ghabrial
My research has been centred around questions of 'multiculturalism' and politics of difference in reference to the Middle-Eastern past and present, with a special interest in race-critical feminist methodologies. My PhD dissertation, under the supervision of Professor Gwyn Campbell, will be a comparative study of the cultural significance of slavery and anti-slavery in the invasion and occupation of French Algeria and the Comoros Islands, and its implications for identity-formation in both colony and metropole.
I developed an interest in the French-African colonial and postcolonial experience while earning my Master's degree in History at Queen's University. There I wrote a paper, entitled "The Making of the Non-Citizen: from subjects to immigrants in the French-Algerian transpolitical space," in which I explored the management of racial and religious difference through French immigration and citizenship policy. I presented this paper in a panel along with Professors Adnan Husain and Ariel Salzmann, my mentors at Queen's, at a conference on multiculturalism and religious difference in democracies, held in Montreal and hosted by the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Research Group. Moving from these themes, my cognate paper, entitled "Beyond Multicultural Citizenship: Finding Feminism in the Headscarf Affair of 1989," was a re-reading of the national scandal in France triggered when two girls of North African descent were expelled from school for wearing Islamic head coverings.
Other research contributions include a presentation of my Honors Thesis, entitled “Negotiating Feminist Identities in Islam: Questions and Conversations for an International Feminisms Project” as part of the Queen’s University annual seminar series. I read French and am engaging in studies of classical Arabic, based on Egyptian heritage-based knowledge.
