This is a conversation with Banah Ghadbian. She’s a Syrian activist whose dissertation “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege” was the subject of our conversation. As usual, we ended up talking about a lot of other things as well.
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Topics Discussed:
- Banah’s story growing up in a Syrian revolutionary family and being targeted by the regime as a result
- The video that Banah released on YouTube in 2011, which the Syrian regime played on state tv
- Her dissertation: Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Performances and Pedagogies under Siege (video summary)
- “How do Syrian women and youth heal from violence? How can our communities be embodied when displaced from our lands and spirits?”
- What is often missing from a lot of discourse regarding Syria?
- The chronicles of Enab Baladi + An idea called Daraya
- How does Banah think about the Syrian story and how it’s often misrepresented online?
- What the Syrian revolution already achieved
- Multiplicities and the entrenched ‘manliness’ of war analyses (reference to episode with Aida Hozic)
- Undoing the diaspora/local binary
- Pedagogies of liberation vs refugee/NGO industrial complex
- Being friends with Hala Barakat, who was murdered in September of 2017 alongside her mother Orouba
- Scarcity idea coming from an inherently capitalist logic
- The Syrian revolution and anti-blackness; intersectionality
- The misleading debates around ‘integration’, Alan Kurdi
- Talking about sectarianism
- Being in the dominant group at home, and in the minority in the diaspora
Recommended Books
Music by Tarabeat.