Contemporary Arab Diasporas: Reimagining Nationhood in Arab Cultural and Digital Feminism

Dr. Raad Khair Allah is an IASH Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities during 2025-26 and has been making a lot of guest appearances for GENDER.ED this year, giving seminars on her research project, an undergraduate feminist research methods workshop and getting involved in teaching. Kaveri Qureshi got to sit with her and hear more about her fascinating and important research.

Hello Raad! You have been busy for GENDER.ED during your IASH Postdoctoral Fellowship - thank you so much! What have you been up to so far, this year?

During my IASH fellowship, I’ve been building the foundations of a major interdisciplinary digital project that maps how Syrian and Palestinian Muslim women in the Western diaspora reimagine and rebuild nationhood through literature, film, art, music, and digital space. 

During the initial months of this fellowship I was busy finalising Contemporary Arab Women Revolutionaries: Radical Traditions (the Warwick Humanities Series, Routledge), an edited volume mapping radical feminist traditions across multiple forms of media since the 1970s. Its arguments about resistance, memory, and transnational belonging provide a direct scholarly and methodological foundation for my current project’s comparative, multimodal approach.

Could you tell us about what you are working on during your fellowship?

I am exploring how Palestinian and Syrian Muslim women in the Western diaspora make the nation “travel”, and how these women carry memory, political identity, and collective belonging through stories, images, music, and digital practices when territorial nationhood is denied or disrupted. I consider how migration, legal status, language, gender, and religion shape artistic expression, digital activism, and public voice. I am exploring the subtle but powerful structures of care, resistance, and remembrance in these digital cultural productions; how the lexicon of home, mother, voice, border, and waiting evolves across generations; how visual motifs like keys, doors, water, and maps circulate across media; and how platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram enable women to build transnational publics of recognition and solidarity. Ultimately, the project shows that these women are not simply “participants” in diaspora; they are cultural architects of portable nationhood.

What are the foundations of this project and what inspired it?

The project builds on my doctoral work, which explored how contemporary Arab women use literary and visual media to challenge orientalist and patriarchal narratives and to construct alternative forms of belonging and nationhood beyond borders. My fellowship now extends that analysis to their transnational experiences and digital activism, highlighting how they navigate complex socio-political landscapes to drive cultural production, advocate for policy change, and reimagine nationhood through digital platforms.

The project also stems from a Harvard University seminar series I attended on exilic writing’s wider role in shaping world literature and is also informed by a digital project, for which I was awarded the Digital Arts and Humanities Lab Hero Medal 2024 from the University of Warwick and was shortlisted for the USA’s Paula Svonkin Creative Award (2022). 

What is the contribution of this project? What is new about it?

While there is literature on Arab nationalism, diaspora experiences, transnational connections, and Arab cyber feminism, these elements have rarely been studied together. My project bridges all these elements, examining how legal status and rights influence both individual and collective identities; here, legal status matters because it determines how safe women feel, how mobile they are, who they can address, and what risks they can take, and these conditions shape the stories they tell, the memories they preserve, and the forms of solidarity they can build across borders. This interdisciplinary approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges and contributions of Syrian and Palestinian Muslim women in the diaspora, contributing to discussions on nation-building, identity, and diaspora.

The project also introduces an original methodological contribution by using AI‑assisted and DH tools to analyse large, multilingual, multimodal corpora, revealing patterns in women’s cultural production that traditional close reading alone cannot detect. Using AI-assisted tools towards the study of Arab Muslim women’s diasporic creativity is itself a new intervention, opening innovative ways of identifying overlooked narratives and aesthetic strategies at scale.

Why did you choose to work on this project? What motivates it?

This project grows out of my own lived experience as a Syrian woman who grew up in a Palestinian neighbourhood in Damascus, a place where memory, loss, and creative survival were woven into everyday life. That proximity taught me two things: the profound strength of Palestinian cultural memory, and the responsibility to approach it with care and non‑appropriative solidarity. Academically, I became frustrated with how scholarship often isolates nationalism, diaspora studies, cyber‑feminism, or Arab women’s literature instead of treating them as interconnected forces shaping each other. Personally, I wanted to honour the cultural labour of women whose creative work is frequently dismissed, under‑explored, or scattered across media in ways that make it difficult to study. And finally, I wanted to bring new tools—digital, feminist, decolonial, computational—into conversation with this work so we can see patterns of voice, resilience, and imagination that have been hiding in plain sight.

The project is an act of intellectual care; it is an effort to map and honour the cultural worlds Palestinian and Syrian women have built across borders, often against extraordinary odds.

What’s on your wish-list for the remaining months in Edinburgh?

In the coming months, I will build the archive I have scoped with colleagues, and then deposit the curated dataset with Edinburgh DataShare so that the corpus may be preserved, citable, and reusable by other scholars. I’ll continue expanding the digital archive into a lasting, open resource for scholars, educators, community groups, and young Arab women seeking creative lineage, while deepening connections across GENDER.ED, CDCS, and IMES to shape cross‑disciplinary conversations on migration, digital activism, and feminist cultural work. 

I also aim to complete a substantial portion of a monograph on Syrian and Palestinian Muslim women’s contributions to nation‑making and prepare an article for Crossings journal.

I’m also looking forward to BRISMES 2026, where I will share new insights in the roundtable “Palestinian Cinema: An Artform against War, Occupation, and Genocide”; my contribution, “Diasporic Visions: Palestinian Women Filmmakers and the Cinematic Archaeology of Dispossession”, examines how women filmmakers in the Western diaspora mobilise form, memory, and intimate realism to practise nation‑building. 

Finally, I will use these outcomes to develop Leverhulme and British Academy applications for a wider programme on the cultural influence of Arab Muslim women’s diasporas.

Link to IASH profile: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr%C2%A0raad-khair-allah