Hossam Madhoun is a 30 years' drama activist, actor, director, and trainer in drama, civil intervention, education, and drama therapist. Besides being active in theatre and drama, Hossam is a child protection officer at MAAN Development Centre leading a team of more than 115 counsellors and social workers who are providing psychosocial support and psychological first aid for children and families displaced from their homes to shelters in Rafah, Khan Younis, and the Middle area in the Gaza Strip. 

 

Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD in Geography and her dissertation, Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine, highlights the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to use indigenous counter-mapping as a cartographic and decolonial praxis to imagine and work toward liberated futures. 

 

Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press)