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Halima Kazem

Associate Director, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
PhD, UC Santa Cruz, Feminist Studies
MA, New York University, Business and Economic Journalism
BA, San Jose State University, Radio and Television/Mass Communications

Dr. Halima Kazem is the Associate Director of Stanford University’s Program in Feminist, Gender, Sexuality studies. Halima’s work is deeply rooted in feminist methodologies and 26 years of working as a journalist, lecturer, human rights researcher, oral historian, and filmmaker. Her research intersects in the areas of gender, empire, human rights, and media with a focus on Afghanistan. Halima’s forthcoming book, A Feminist History of Afghanistan: Resisting the Erasure of Women, unearths and narrates the little-told feminist history of women’s movements in Afghanistan. It will be published in the fall of 2025. Halima is also collaborating with the Hoover Institution as an oral historian and building an oral history archive about the US Afghan war. From 2022-2024 Halima was a University of California Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow, where she started directing a documentary film about the codification of gender apartheid as a crime under international law.

In a decades-long career as a journalist, Halima published more than 300 news features and produced dozens of video stories for platforms as diverse as The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek Productions, Al Jazeera English and America, and the United Nations Fund for Women. This work entailed on-the ground investigative journalism internationally and in the United States –often in areas experiencing conflict and war—with government officials, ordinary citizens, and combatants. Her stories covered a diverse range of important topics, from women’s rights and constraints inTurkey, domestic violence in New Zealand, presidential elections in Afghanistan, and  LGBTQ rights and immigration in the United States.

Before joining Stanford University, Halima was a lecturer at San Jose State University for more than a decade and taught classes such as, Documentary Filmmaking, Media Law, Senior Seminar in Human Rights and Social Justice, and Gender and Crime. She also taught Women and War: A Transnational Feminist Analysis and Feminist Files Podcasting UCSC.  Earlier in her career, Halima worked for organizations such as the World Bank and the Institute for War and Peace reporting in training journalists on how to report sexual and gender-based violence, political rights, and business journalism. From 2002-2007 she co-produced “Frontrunner,” a documentary chronicling the campaign of the first female presidential candidate in Afghanistan.

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