In the 1990s, I gained clarity that the U.S. had been destroying and displacing my people in Iraq and Palestine. In 1994, I co-founded the Seattle, San Francisco, and North American chapters of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA). Through AWSA, I co-created an Arab feminist movement that worked to dismantle the sexist and homophobic systems of U.S.-led war and racism and to integrate Arab feminist perspectives into U.S. feminist of color movements. We sent delegations to the UN World Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, Egypt 1994) and the UN World Conference on Women (Beijing, China, 1995). AWSA helped integrate gender justice into the vision of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco Chapter’s (now AROC) and we worked with the Oakland based Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC) to bring Arab American feminist perspectives on Zionism and racism to the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

After I completed my PhD from the University of California, Davis in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Arab American activism in 2001, I moved to Cairo, Egypt to work as an Assistant Professor at the American University of Cairo. There, I built alliances with feminist organizations like the Women and Memory Forum and New Woman Foundation.In 2002, I joined the national board of INCITE! (a network of feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities). With INCITE!, I helped integrate the idea that war is a feminist and LGBTQ concern into INCITE’s national conferences, resources for activists, and co-edited book The Color of Violence. also served on the steering committee of movements like Racial Justice 911 to support immigrants and communities of color targeted by the post 9/11 backlash in the U.S. and the growing war of terror.

For 10 years, I worked as a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003-2013). There, I co-founded the academic program, Arab and Muslim American Studies which places research and activism about Arab and Muslim Americans in relation to the wide range of indigenous, racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in the U.S and prioritizes community-based approaches that link universities with local Arab and Muslim American communities from a social-justice-based perspective. 

Between 2011 and 2015, I joined feminist activists in Lebanon and Egypt to document and uplift the stories of their participation in the Arab Spring revolutions and related  movements for democracy and regime change, culminating in publications like The Radical Potential of Mothering during the Egyptain Revolution and “Reflections on Feminist Interventions within the 2015 Anticorruption Protests in Lebanon HYPERLINK TO THESE ESSAYS IN ACADEMIA.EDU.”

In 2013, I relocated to the University of Illinois at Chicago where she was hired as a Co-PI of the Diaspora Cluster within the Chancellor’s Cluster Initiative for Faculty Diversity.  At UIC, I am the faculty founder of the first center on a college campus serving the needs of Arab American students in the United States. The Arab American Cultural Center at UIC builds community, solidarity, and safe spaces while promoting social justice, equality, and inclusivity at UIC and the Chicagoland area.  She has also served as a director and a steering committee member of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.  At UIC, I also serve on the advisory board of the Social Justice Initiative at UIC and I am co-director of the Race and Empire Working Group within the Institute for the Humanities.

Between 2013 and 2017, I supported the Arab Women’s Committee of Chicago to co-published a book written by and about Arab immigrant and refugee women about their struggles with displacement, immigration, and isolation and their path towards defining empowerment, dignity, and liberation on their own terms.

In 2020, I co-founded the collective, MAMAS (mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity). MAMAS is a collective of people conducting the labor of mothering about Black, indigenous, and people of color-based communities. Our vision is to integrate the voices and strategies of mamas into social movements, media debates, and policy processes about the systems sustaining U.S. empire and white-supremacy—from policing and immigration to colonization and war. We believe this integration is necessary if we are to survive these systems and build the kinds of connections and alternatives needed to build a just and loving society.