2023-24 Events

HAnnah ajala is an international journalist currently specialising in podcasts for organisations like the BBC and CBC, and has spent the past three years travelling across Africa working on a range of stories and broadcasting for international and local organisations. A lot of her work specialises in real life storytelling, women’s empowerment, culture and art, fashion and music current affairs, and most recently, true crime. She is passionate about shedding positive and engaging light on stories coming from communities which are often misrepresented and marginalised.

noura erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards sponsored by the Middle East Monitor and winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award's Bronze Medial in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, "Gaza In Context," that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals. She recently completed a Non-Resident Visiting Fellowship in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Religious Literacy Project at the Harvard Divinity School and the Mahmoud Darwish Fellowship in Palestinian Studies at Brown University. 

Lilian agu (c'25) is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, majoring in Africana Studies. Lilian is a member of the  Verbal Mayhem, an open mic, spoken word student organization and Wanawake, an African student organization emphasizing African women empowerment. .