In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Azza Basarudin (bio) and Khanum Shaikh (bio)

This special issue of the journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, entitled “Scholar, Mentor, Activist: Sondra Hale’s Transnational Feminist Commitments,” aims to highlight the seminal contributions of Professor Sondra Hale to the fields of anthropology, gender studies, Middle East studies, Sudan studies, and African studies. Sondra retired in December 2011 after over two decades of holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).1 To honor Sondra’s life’s work, in October 2011, Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) and Sherine Hafez (UC Riverside) convened a conference entitled “Gender, Art, and Social Movements in the Middle East and Global South.”2 A few months later, the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) presented Sondra with a lifetime achievement award scholarship at their dinner at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting.3 These conferences brought together Sondra’s colleagues, current and former students, and family and friends to reflect on her personal and professional contributions. This special issue then, is primarily, although not exclusively, based on these conferences.

We approach the Introduction of this special issue as former students of Sondra. We both graduated from the Department of Women’s Studies (now the Department of Gender Studies) at UCLA, and we each brought our own trajectories, interests, and histories to graduate school. It was in the 1990s that Azza became aware of Sondra’s work via her involvement with Arab Women Solidarity Association (AWSA), a transnational group of Arab women in the diaspora who came together in cyberspace to discuss issues related to activism, identity, and politics.4 While Azza was completing an M.A. in gender studies in Chicago, she and Sondra were “e-mail buddies” who exchanged ideas and thoughts on gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. [End Page 1] Azza’s interest in Sondra’s work on gender and feminist anthropology, women’s movements, and transnational and postcolonial theories deepened through these cyber conversations. She then applied to the Women’s Studies doctoral program at UCLA to study with Sondra. Khanum, on the other hand, had taken a course on Women’s Social Movements with Sondra while pursuing an undergraduate major in economics at UCLA in the early 1990s. Sondra’s course exposed students to social movement literature from around the world, focusing on the ways that women act collectively to re-think and transform the conditions of their lives. Learning about these movements spurred Khanum’s interest in thinking about gender in global contexts, and upon returning to UCLA for doctoral work a decade later she approached Sondra to guide her study on women’s religious activism in Pakistan. Our relationship to Sondra, then, has been that of junior scholars in the field of gender studies who have been mentored by Sondra, and it is from this vantage point that we introduce this special issue.

Sondra Hale’s scholarship focuses on women’s movements and organizations, Islamic movements, postcolonial studies, transnational gender studies, and memory and resistance. Straddling several disciplines, her scholarship often addresses questions that emerge from the contradictory assumptions that frame these disciplines. Hence she brings into focus questions that urge a re-thinking of a series of relationships, e.g. between gender, race, class, ethnicity, and the state; between Islam and women’s agency; between feminist methodology, ethnographic accountability, and the politics of representation; between politics and political activism; and between the role of memory in conflict zones and resistance—questions that remain significant in feminist studies in general, and to the study of gender in the MENA region more specifically. Sondra’s career spans a period of more than fifty years with publications in peer reviewed journals, books, magazines, and e-bulletins,5 as well as a flourishing ongoing research agenda that pushes into new areas of inquiry. Many of her works have been translated into Arabic, including, most recently, her book Gender Politics in Sudan: Socialism, Islamism and the State—the first-ever Sudanese gender studies book to be translated from English to Arabic (Hale 1996).

Despite her commitment to creative cross-disciplinary...

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