On September 3-6, 2018, the Kurdish Institute in Paris organized the Kurdish Studies Summer School Program for postgraduate students, focusing on Kurdish politics and society. The summer school was opened by the renowned academic, Dr. Hamit Bozarslan, who is based in Paris’s School of Advance Studies in the Social Sciences. Dr. Borzarslan discussed methodological issues in the field.
Dr. Choman Hardi was one of the keynote speakers, along with Dr. Ipek Demir (University of Leicester), Dr. Cengiz Gunes (Open University), Dr. Clémence Scalbert-Yucel (University of Exeter), Dr. Janet Klein (Akron), and Dr. Salih Akin (University of Rouen). The areas of focus included Kurdish history and language, diaspora and transnationalism, political movement and discourse, gender issues, and literature and culture.
Dr. Hardi’s lecture drew on the work of scholars such as Andrea Fischer-Tahir, Minoo Alinia, Nadje Al-Ali, Shahrzad Mojab, and Karin Mlodoch, as well as her own research, to address the construction of masculinity and femininity in Kurdish society, the causes of gender-based violence, the experiences of women survivors of genocide, and the achievements and limitations of the women’s movement in Kurdistan-Iraq. Participating students presented their research and received feedback from the lecturers and their peers.