Jennifer Mogannam is a Visiting Scholar at the Feminist Research Institute at the University of California, Davis. Her work is situated within an interdisciplinary examination of 20th and 21st century Arab transnational social movements within specific sites of gendered labor in anti-colonial struggle and sites of violence as epistemic and nonbinary, framing the stakes and limits of revolution for stateless subjects and its gendered praxis. This project reframes how gendered labor is imagined, reflected upon and assumed as part of larger aspirations of both anti-colonial struggle and undermining patriarchy in spaces of national liberation. 

Jennifer earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, “Revolution Until Victory?: Decolonizing Land, Nation, and the People through Palestinian-Lebanese Transnational Resistance Praxis,” is an interdisciplinary, transnational oral history and cultural studies feminist analysis of the Palestinian and Lebanese revolution in Lebanon in the 1970s. It defines resistance praxis by examining processes and dynamics of coalition-building, national liberation struggle through the positionality of stateless refuge, epistemic colonial violence and gendered labor. While conducting her research, she also participated in UC San Diego’s Critical Immigration and Refugee Studies research group, a project that received funding and recognition from the University of California Center for the Humanities. 

She received a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon in 2012 and has spent extensive time living, researching and studying in the Middle East. While there, she actively engaged in Palestinian community organizing, the Palestinian Cultural Club and AUB and spearheaded the founding of the Week of Resistance Against Israeli Apartheid and Colonialism in Lebanon. As an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, she organized with Students for Justice in Palestine and General Union of Palestine Students and served as a research assistant for the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas initiative in the College of Ethnic Studies.

Jennifer is an active member and former national and international board member of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). As a PYM member she has established chapters in the Bay Area, Lebanon and San Diego and has participated in others as well. As a community organizer, she is committed to cross movement organizing and relationship building and has devoted more than a decade to programmatic organizing, student organization mentorship, popular education curriculum building, workshop facilitation, and strategic planning. Co-organizing alongside multiple diverse communities in struggle, such as with the Enero Zapatista grassroots committee in San Diego, she has grounded her commitments to movement work as well as her research and teaching interests in transnational revolution, decolonial struggle, and cross-community relations.

Jennifer has taught courses at UC San Diego, San Francisco State University, Chabot College, and UC Berkeley in comparative Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies and Arab and Muslim studies, including for the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program, the first of its kind. 

Publications:

Mogannam, Jennifer. "Syria’s anti-imperialist mask: unveiling contradictions of the left through anti-capitalist thought." Social Identities 24, no. 2 (2018): 222-237.

 Mogannam, Jennifer, and Leslie Quintanilla.  "Borders Are Obsolete: Relations beyond the" Borderlands" of Palestine and US–Mexico." American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1039-1046.

 Research Interests: 

Palestine studies; transnational women of color feminisms; critical refugee studies; comparative ethnic studies; revolution; violence; social movements; decolonization; indigeneity; colonialism; imperialism; gendered labor; Marxist thought; neoliberalism

Advisors and Mentors: 

Doctoral: Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Kalindi Vora, Dennis Childs, Jodi Kim, Yen Espiritu  

Masters: Mayssun Succarieh, Rosemary Sayigh, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Tarif Khalidi

Website: www.jennifermogannam.com