The Department congratulates Assistant Professor Nisrin Elamin for receiving the Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). This award honors scholars who have demonstrated a deep commitment to anti-colonial and racial justice in any world region.
Nisrin’s research traces the spatialized geography of imperial power in and beyond Sudan, while also paying attention to processes and dynamics that threaten to destabilize such power. Drawing on her research in a range of publications, and a decade of community-organizing, she has documented how the Gezira region constitutes an important node in emergent empire-making by Gulf Arab States across the Sahel, one unsettled by varied forms of rural resistance. S commitment to social justice, and challenges to structural violence in Sudan, the African diaspora, and Black communities, is evident in academic scholarship and teaching, public intellectual outreach, policy reports, and work in and with campus and community organizations.
Nisrin’s insights and analyses have become ever more necessary, and sought after, since war erupted in April of 2023 between different factions of Sudan’s military coup regime, a war linked to on-going displacement of 10 million people, deaths, disappearances, and violence against women. Her work helps to explain how legacies of resistance helped create 8000 neighborhood resistance committees across the country, as the only viable path out of the war and towards the emergence of a popular, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist democracy.
Since 2023, Nisrin has played a leading role in developing the Sudan Solidarity Collective with students at the University of Toronto. The Collective has raised around $350,000 for volunteer-run emergency response rooms in the areas hardest hit by Sudan's war, as well as farmers’ unions. With the Collective, Dr. Elamin has engaged in campus education about Sudan, including teach-ins, film screenings, immigration advocacy and solidarity work throughout the Sudanese diaspora.
Nisrin will be receiving her Award at The Awards Ceremony will be held at the 2024 AAA Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida.
- Date & Time: Wednesday, November 20th 7:30p - 8:30p
- Location: Tampa Marriot Water Street 505 Water St, Tampa, FL 33602
- Room: Ballroom B