Talking Empowerment Workshops

News Item
By: Hania Sholkamy

On 4 and 5 January 2008, the Pathways Middle East Hub had their first Talking Empowerment in Arabic workshop in Cairo. This was a meeting of editors and translators working on gender readers in Arabic. Also present were some translation theory academics.

From 13 to 15 January a second workshop was held in Om Durman in Sudan. The meeting included feminists, academics, activists and politicians, and development workers and addressed the difficulties of translating gender and empowerment both as a language and as a political project. It was very well attended with about 30  participants and included many graduate students.

From 15 to 18 January the Hub held a feminist story telling workshop conducted by four trainers from the Women and Memory Forum. The meeting was oversubscribed and included actors, journalists, poets, students and feminists. It was well reported in the press and resulted in 20 extremely well written stories, three of which will feature in a Pathways programme performance by Women and Memory in June.

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  • Research Project

    Talking Empowerment in Plain Arabic

    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. …

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