A conversation with Alma Khasawnih about the different pathways she's taken into getting her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies.
Listen to "With Alma Khasawnih مع ألمى خصاونة" on Spreaker.
About Alma
My name is alma. I study graffiti. I used to be an artist. I want to become a pop singer (not really because I cannot sing or hold a tune, but I dream of the attention). I live with Rocca, the cat, and hoard plants (at present, I think i have 28). Razan is one of my best friends.
Here is a more formal academic biography:
alma khasawnih researches access to the street in post-colonial and settler-colonial nation-states as a site of understanding and articulating access to citizenship. alma’s research projects examine ephemeral visual culture production (graffiti, murals, and other forms of street/public art) as stand-alone material objects that orient, disorient, and reorient feminist debates on social political-cultural movements within urban geographies and the phenomenology of erasure, co-optation, and resistance. alma is invested in examining how urban beautification projects and cleansing public spaces are part of authoritarian visual culture and politics of respectability that aims at policing minoritized bodies in public spaces.
alma earned a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle; an M.A. in Community Art Education from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and a BS in Environmental Policy and Behavior from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
You can contact Alma via her email
almakhasawnih[at]gmail.com