Engaging #MeToo in the South Asian and Iranian Diaspora Contexts

Join us for an important conversation about the ways that the #MeToo movement has impacted and challenged women in the South Asian and Iranian diaspora contexts. Professors Kasturi Ray and Catherine Sameh will share their research about how SWANA women have responded to larger conversations about patriarchy, male oppression, and the dynamics of gender that have followed many into their immigrant and diaspora communities in the United States. This conversation will be faciltated by the Center's director, Dr. Persis Karim.

About our guests:

Dr. Kasturi Ray is Associate Professor and Chair of Women and Gender Studies at SF State. She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University; M.A. from UC-Berkeley; and B.A. from Barnard/Columbia University. Her research areas of interest include gender, race, and labor in Asian diasporas; social health and sexual freedoms; and abolition feminisms. She has collaborated with SF State’s Dr. Santhi Kavuri-Bauer and Dr. Falu Bakrania to write and develop programming in art and representation in South Asian diasporic visual cultures. Her most recent publication, co-authored with Dr. Julietta Hua, is Behind the Wheel: Drivers’ Lives in the Age of Uber (U of Minnesota Press).

Dr. Catherine Sameh is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Axis of Hope: Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders (University of Washington Press, 2019). Her research explores gender and feminisms in Iran and the diaspora, social movements in the Middle East, gender and Islam, human rights, transnational feminist networks, feminist responses to Islamophobia, and intersectional and decolonial feminist epistemologies and political practices.

E-mail: iraniandiasporastudies@sfsu.edu