Dr. Choman Hardi’s Speech at the Annual Gender Center Conference
I returned to teach English Literature and set up gender studies at AUIS in 2014. The university was not in a position to start a new program at the time. The IS war, the Ezidi genocide, the IDP and refugee crisis, and the economic hardship made it difficult to initiate a gender studies program. I started organizing events, providing training, and developing gender related courses in the English department to start the process.
Teaching full time and working on the centre was difficult but a donation from our patron, Ms. Jan Warner, made it possible to embark on this important project. In 2015, this donation enabled me to establish the Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) at AUIS with Ms. Shireen Saib. A year later, other colleagues joined the team and started developing courses. Dr. Lynn Rose has been an essential member of the centre since, teaching, training, and initiating projects.
In 2017, two years after founding the centre, we had developed 8 courses and we initiated our interdisciplinary gender studies minor, the first in Iraq. We wanted to ensure that gender studies does not become an elitist project of private universities but a part and parcel of every university education. This is why we started looking into funding for a project which would make mother tongue resources in gender studies accessible to public universities.
I would like to thank Ms. Sherri Talabani, who is here today. She is one of CGDS’s advisers and she participated in our first meeting with the European Union in 2016. In 2018, we were successful in obtaining funding from the EU to translate gender studies resources into Arabic and Kurdish for four undergraduate programs: Law, Media, Education, and Social Work. By the end of the project we will have about 2500 pages of academic texts translated for these departments.
Two other important aspects of the EU project are reviewing primary education textbooks to identify any form of discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, ability and religion, in order to make recommendations for change to the ministries of education (KRG and Iraq). We are also monitoring Kurdish and Arabic media to identify the ways the media constructs and emphasizes gender inequality and oppresses women. We hope that this research will help us make recommendations for the ministries of culture in this regard.
Before addressing the importance of the EU project for the newly established gender studies centers in Kurdistan, I want to emphasize that sometimes the Kurdistan government passes good laws and decrees when it comes to gender equality but it struggles when it comes to implementation. For example, it passes the Combating Violence within the Family Law in 2019 but does not fully implement it. It adopts the quota system to increase women’s participation in decision making, but it chooses women based on party loyalty, not on merit. It opens the space for women’s rights activists to work for gender equality but it stands by as they are attacked by various unknown and known sectors in the community. It opens gender studies centers in universities but does not provide them with money, textbooks, or training to help them succeed.
The August 2018 Decree by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research which mandated the establishment of the gender studies centers is a great opportunity for the Kurdistan region. We hope that the texts we are producing in the EU project can be utilized by the newly established centers as part of their curriculum. It is important that we start this new field with a unified message, in line with current theoretical developments in gender studies.
I want to end by reiterating what Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said, “If your dreams do not scare you, then they are not big enough.” We have big dreams for gender equality and we are cautiously and optimistically working towards them. We know that it will be a long process but we will persevere.