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The special journal issue sprung out of a special panel at the IACS 2009 Tokyo Conference. The panel, entitled ‘Women Negotiating Islam’ had looked at how women in different locations cope with the ways that religion, either as politics or as culture, enters their lives. …

This project researched the reforms that have been taking place in Egyptian personal status laws since 2000. The aim was to examine the unfolding reform story and what it entailed in terms of successes and challenges for women's rights activists in their pursuit of justice and equality in marriage and divorce rights, and for Egyptian women at large who seek legal redress in family courts. The focus of the study was on two aspects of the reform story: 1) the process of mobilising for the new laws, building alliances, choosing strategies, and making concessions, and 2) the implementation of the legal reforms in the new family courts that were introduced in 2004. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

This project links talented young documentary filmmakers with academics from the Pathways consortium to collaborate on a series of shorts broadly exploring concepts around women’s empowerment. …

This project aimed to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. If, as has been often noted, women’s empowerment is a cause without a following and a message without an audience, then there is an obvious need to talk and tackle women’s empowerment and develop the coherence and capacity to do so in Arabic. The conflation between Arabic and Islam has focused researchers on religion as the equivalent of language. This project ran a series of workshops held in plain Arabic to discuss the agendas of women’s empowerment and the flows that influence, set, shape, critique and communicate them. …

Dr Mulki Al Sharmani from the Middle East Hub attended the 106th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC from 28 to 30 November 2007. Her paper was part of a panel entitled ‘Negotiating Conceptions of Family, Intimacy, and Marriage’. The panel was reviewed by the Association for Feminist Anthropology. There were five presentations in the panel. …

The Social Research Center at the American University Cairo recently ran and were involved with hosting two back to back workshops on Family Law. The first one on ‘Reforming Family Laws in the Middle East’ aimed to disseminate the findings of the research that the SRC team has been conducting on the reforms in Egyptian family laws. The second, which ran from 9-11 January 2009, was hosted by The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief on ‘Guidelines for Islamic Family Law: Women’s Equality, Male Guardianship, and Legal Objectives’. …