Book Launch: Working Women in Jordan, by Dr. Fida Adely
Dr. Fida Adely is joined by Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji to discuss her latest book Working Women In Jordan: Education, Migration, and Aspiration. This book talk is hosted by the Mortara Center for International Studies and sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
In Working Women in Jordan anthropologist Fida J. Adely turns to college-educated women in Jordan who migrate from rural provinces to Amman for employment opportunities. Building on twelve years of ethnographic research and extensive interviews with dozens of women, as well as some of their family members, Adely analyzes the effects of developments such as expanded educational opportunities, urbanization, privatization, and the restructuring of the labor market on women’s life trajectories, gender roles, the institution of marriage, and kinship relations. Through these rich narrative accounts and the analysis of broader socio-economic shifts, Adely explains how educational structures can act as both facilitators and obstacles to workforce entry—along with cascading consequences for family and social life. Deeply thorough and compelling, Working Women in Jordan asks readers to think more critically about what counts as development, and for whom.
Fida Adely is an Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies. She is also currently serving as the Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown. Dr. Adely is an anthropologist and her research interests include education, labor, development, and gender in the Arab world. Her primary research site has been Jordan, although she teaches and writes about the Arab world more broadly.
Dr. Adely received her PhD in 2007 at Teachers College (Columbia University) in Comparative Education and Anthropology. She was previously a lecturer at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, as well as a visiting professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College/Columbia University.
Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji is an Associate Professor and the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Associate Professor of Muslim Societies at Georgetown University. She researches and writes about the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts. She explores this theme particularly in relation to Muslim populations in South Asia and in the North American diaspora. She is the author of award-winning books and articles. Her latest work is The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
Professor Khoja-Moolji holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a masters from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Columbia University. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.