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Junior Fellows are junior African scholars selected on a competitive basis. In the second and fourth years of the project, ISITA sponsors a competition, open to Africans who are either advanced doctoral students (studying in an African university or abroad) or junior scholars/researchers working in African universities who have received their last degree within the past five years. Applicants must submit a research proposal that directly relates to the yearly theme. Those selected spend an academic quarter in residence at Northwestern University, where they take part in a seminar and utilize the resources of the Africana library collection. ISITA hosted five Junior Fellows in 2002 (see profiles under Past Fellows) and is hosting three Junior Fellows during the spring quarter of 2004.
Oluwakemi Adesina, a PhD student in history at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, is writing a thesis on divorce and women’s rights in colonial southwestern Nigeria. Her ISITA project, "Whose Children Were They? Of Single Mothers, Divorced Women, Unclaimed Pregnancies, and Gender Politics in Nigeria’s Sharia Law," explores how women have been affected by new Sharia-based penal codes in several Northern Nigerian states since 1999. She will provide a close analysis of the recent cases of Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu and Amina Lawal, both of whom were accused of zina (extramarital sex) and faced death by stoning if found guilty.
Na’eem Jeenah is a PhD candidate and lecturer in political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, whose thesis is on political Islam in South Africa. He is also a journalist, community leader, activist, and the host of regular talk shows on community radio stations. His research project on "Islamic Feminisms in South Africa" explores the emergence of Islamic feminisms in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1990s. He will examine the confluence of factors that gave rise to Islamic feminism in the 1990s, including the actions of Muslim South African women who pushed the limits of Muslim women’s participation in the public domain for three decades prior to the 1990s; the development of political Islam in South Africa in the 1980s and its interaction with the national liberation struggle; and an international trend towards rereading the Islamic scriptures from a textual perspective and specifically the reinterpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna from a feminist perspective.
Mwanakombo Mohamed Noordin is a PhD student in Swahili and African languages at Moi University, Kenya, where she is conducting research on Swahili literature and culture as tools for development. Her ISITA project, "Between a Hard Place, a Rock, and Patriarchy: Modernism, Mysticism, and Male Conservatism in Islam," examines the struggles of Swahili women to create visibility and space for themselves in the public sphere. Her project investigates how women have empowered themselves despite patriarchal limitations, but also how they resist assimilation and the impetus of secularization by reaffirming their Islamic identity. An important component of her research will be to investigate how Swahili women’s involvement in mysticism affects their visibility in the public domain.
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