Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Abstract
This talk examines how Palestinian women use digital platforms to produce political testimony and feminist knowledge under conditions of ongoing war and displacement. Focusing on contemporary forms of digital activism, the lecture explores how online spaces such as Instagram function as counter-archives that document lived experience, challenge dominant media representations, and assert presence in the face of erasure. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theory, the talk argues that digital testimony transforms survival into a political act, redefining Palestinian women not as passive subjects of humanitarian discourse but as active producers of meaning, history, and resistance. By situating these practices within broader debates on media, power, and representation, the lecture highlights the role of digital environments in reshaping contemporary forms of political expression and knowledge production.
Speaker
Dr. Hanan Alawna is visiting scholar at the C²DH from 1 May to 30 June 2026. She is a Palestinian scholar specializing in literary and cultural studies, with a focus on feminism, digital media, and contemporary Arab thought. She holds a PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research spans both literary and digital contexts, examining Palestinian women’s representation and cultural production as sites of resistance. Her doctoral work engaged with Palestinian literature, including the writings of Sahar Khalifeh, analyzing how literary texts challenge and subvert dominant representations of the “Third World” and Middle Eastern woman. Building on this foundation, her current research explores how Palestinian women use digital platforms to produce counter-narratives, document lived realities, and reshape political and cultural discourse. She is currently a Research Fellow at Columbia Global Center-Amman, where she is developing her project on digital resistance and feminist knowledge production in online spaces. Dr. Alawna has presented her work at international conferences and has published on topics related to gender, representation, and Middle Eastern cultural politics.