Lecture by Rania K. Sweis, Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

Dr. Sweis holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University where she was a Fellow at the Research Institute for Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) and a Fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a medical anthropologist who specializes in gender and transnational processes. Dr. Sweis earned an M.A. in anthropology from Stanford University and a B.A. Summa Cum Laude in cultural and social anthropology from the University of California at Irvine. She was a Junior Fellow in the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (AAPSS) and has conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, France, Lebanon and a Muslim-American community in the United States.

Broadly, Dr. Sweis's research lies at the intersection of the politics of humanitarianism and the social production of childhood and youth in contemporary Egypt. Her dissertation traces biomedical interventions performed by workers of European and U.S. based NGOs on behalf of young people defined as "poor" and "at-risk" in Egypt. Within these analytic concerns, she explores the ethical contours of how young life and bodies are managed and suffering regulated through transnational mechanisms of power and expertise. Her work advances ethnographic studies of child and youth subjectivity in Egypt by grounding an analysis of young people’s everyday lives within state and economic restructuring and the increased globalization of children’s rights and humanitarian aid across the Global South.

At the 2011 Middle East Studies Association (MESA) meeting, Dr. Sweis won both the MESA Graduate Paper Prize and the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Graduate Paper Prize for her paper "Saving Egypt's Village Girls.

Light refreshments will be served.

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies