Please join us to learn about the research from Alexis Hernando and Zhanar Beketova.

Presenter: Alexis Hernando Cubas
Title: Sovereignty Beyond Occupation: Saharawi Women and the Khayma-Nation 

Abstract:
This research proposes a review of the forms of political activism of Sahrawi women in the context of the refugee camps located in the Tindouf region in southwestern Algeria. Specifically, I examine their role as leaders, cultural mediators of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and preservers of historical memory, where care and reciprocity policies are adopted as part of an anti-imperial ethos. My argument posits that the jaima—the Sahrawi tent—operates as a physical and moral space where domestic care policies and the political and diplomatic activity of Sahrawi women converge. This ethos transcends the boundaries of the camps and extends into diasporic solidarity networks, built through intellectual exchange with other geographies of the Hispanic world. This study is based on the ethnographic research of Konstantina Isidoros and Laura Casielles, who analyze the formation of these women's political networks as an exceptional case within the Arab world. In the first part of the essay, I examine the imperial period of Spanish occupation and the Westernization policies implemented to dismantle female networks, which entailed a process of forced sedentarization of pastoralist populations, necessary for the metropolis' extractivist ambitions. In the second part, I analyze the reactivation of care networks within the framework of the failed decolonization process toward the end of Francoism and the Polisario Front’s struggle against the illegal Moroccan occupation. In sum, the contribution of this work is to place Sahrawi women’s care work at the center of the discussion on the construction and maintenance of Sahrawi national identity, understanding the relational nature of the ethos learned in the jaima beyond the desert and rather as a way of participating in global dynamics.

Presenter: Zhanar Beketova

Titel: Female Agency as a Mirrow of the Society: Ilse Aichinger's Spiegelgeschichte (Story in a Mirrow)
 
Abstract:
This paper examines Spiegelgeschichte through the lens of feminist narratology, arguing that Aichinger constructs a dual-layered account of female agency: one that is linguistically assertive yet socially constrained in her faculty of action. The protagonist gains narrative and rhetorical control in the act of self-address, using language to express grief, critique social institutions, and demand redress for the botched abortion that caused her death. However, as Aichinger’s poetics of reversal reveal, this form of discursive agency is juxtaposed with the protagonist’s material and structural disempowerment in life. Decisions about her body and future are made not by her but by others: her lover, her father, the medical personnel, and the larger society that pathologizes and punishes her desire for autonomy. The story thereby dramatizes how female agency is both fluid and contingent, constantly negotiated at the intersection of voice and silence, narrative and death, self and other. Deploying feminist narratology as a critical methodology, this paper situates Aichinger’s narrator as a doubled subject—both the speaker and the spoken-to—and interprets the second- person voice as a vehicle for both empowerment and alienation.
 

Lunch will be provided.