Dr Isabel Käser is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE and a lecturer at the University of Bern. She works on the intersection of gender, conflict, migration and body politics, with a background in postcolonial and transnational feminist theory. She completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where she wrote a feminist ethnography on the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement. Her work, which is currently being turned into a book, is a transnational analysis of women’s tools and mechanisms of resistance to different forms of violence and contributes to debates around gender and war, feminism and nationalism, as well as militarism and sexuality. Her fieldwork took her to the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where she worked with the politicians, activists and guerrillas of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (PKK). Her post-doc project looks at the personal trajectories of former fighters, people who have left radical leftist or nationalist armed movements and are living as refugees in the Middle East or the European diaspora. She is currently on fieldwork in Northern Iraq and is also teaching at the American University in Duhok.

 

Aside from conflict and gender, Isabel Käser is also interested in artistic knowledge production and is currently finishing a research project on ‘Art in Peace Mediation’ for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, which looks at the potential role of art and artistic practices in processes of peace mediation.

 

Isabel Käser is the co-director of Culture Project, a feminist art organisation based in Iraqi Kurdistan and the UK. Culture Project is a platform (online and print magazine) for artists and writers, where critical voices from Kurdistan and the diaspora are gathered, advancing debates around conservative gender norms and relations, particularly through artistic and cultural knowledge production. She is also a co-founder of the Iraqi Center for Policy Analysis & Research (ICPAR), an Iraq-based and Iraqi-led research group.

 

https://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/people/Isabel-Kaser

Email: ik7@soas.ac.uk

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-k%C3%A4ser-669134195/?originalSubdomain=uk

Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3568-3107