Gender, Law and Social Change in the Gulf: Reflections from the Field

Gender, Law and Social Change in the Gulf: Reflections from the Field

 A public lecture by Sumaiya Al-Wahaibi, postdoctoral researcher on the GulfFeminisms Project at the University of Copenhagen

What happens when a woman stands before an Islamic court and raises her hand? What does it mean to fight for a divorce in a system built by men, staffed by men, governed by centuries of male jurisprudence, and to win, or fail, or be told to come back next month? This lecture brings you inside Oman's sharia courts, into hearing rooms where women argued their cases in real time, where families broke down, and where the distance between law on paper and law in practice became viscerally clear. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork and over ninety interviews across five court sites, Dr. Al-Wahaibi offers an ethnographic account of gender, legal agency and institutional power in one of the Gulf's most under-studied legal systems, while reflecting frankly on what it costs, intellectually and emotionally, to produce feminist scholarship from inside it.


Bio:
Sumaiya Al-Wahaibi is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the GulfFeminisms project at the University of Copenhagen. She was previously a Visiting Scholar at New York University Abu Dhabi and has worked with several UN agencies, including UNFPA, UNICEF, and UNESCO Headquarters. With a strong background in international relations, Al-Wahaibi has extensive experience in conducting research and managing multidisciplinary projects. She has also held academic roles, including serving as a teaching assistant at the University of Otago. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Otago, and her forthcoming publications focus on state–society relations and gendered politics in the GCC.

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