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= Ruba Salih = Ruba Salih (Arabic: ربى صالح ; born 18 November 1969) is an Italo-Palestinian social anthropologist. She mainly works on issues of migration, transnationalism, gender, and refugees.

Life and Career
Ruba Salih was born on 18 November 1969 and grew up as a second-generation Palestinian in Italy. She holds a PhD from the University of Sussex. She is currently employed as a reader of gender and migration studies at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London and convener of the Master’s programme Migration and Diaspora. She is also a member of the London Middle East Institute (LMEI), Centre for Palestine Studies (CPS) and Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.

Salih is an activist which is sensitive the question of justice for the Palestinian people. She has expressed concern about "increasing censorship and silencing that permeates European and North American academic and mainstream public spheres where, currently, the spaces for critical debates and intellectual mobilization on Palestine/Israel are dramatically shrinking.” To put it differently, she has highlighted that academics and journalists who are trying to expose historical or ongoing violations of Palestinians’ rights are facing increasing difficulties. Moreover, she has taken a positive stance in favour of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions(BDS) movement. She argues that this movement is democratic, as it offers a liberal space of critical knowledge production and thus the beginning of a process that aims at extending freedom to all. Her stance thus directly contradicts the arguments of the movement’s criticizers who describe the BDS as anti-Semitic and anti-democratic.

In 2017, Salih was supposed to chair a panel about BDS at the University of Cambridge. At the last minute, she was replaced as the chair by the University “over concerns over her neutrality”. Hundreds of academics and students signed an open letter condemning the university’s conduct stressing the importance of ongoing academic discussions on Israel and BDS. The University of Cambridge later apologized for their decision and recognized that there was no support indicating Salih would not ensure a democratic debate, allowing all views to be expressed. Moreover, they acknowledged that their decision evoked “understandable” concerns relating to academic freedom.

This event sparked a large public debate in the UK over BDS, as other academic events organized by the BDS faced similar discrimination.

Work
Ruba Salih’s research is centred around topics of migration, gender, transnationalism and Palestinian refugees. Her studies of different diasporas raise questions with regards to multiculturalism, citizenship, and Islam in Europe. She writes and publishes in English and Italian. Her work can roughly be divided into two different categories written at different periods of her career. In the first 10 years, she mainly wrote on migration, analysing the transnational lives of Moroccan women in Southern Europe. In the last 10 years, her focus shifted to the Palestinian refugees scattered across the neighbouring countries in the region. She analyses their political imaginaries and activism and highlights how they radically rethink the relationship between state and society.

Her best-known work is her book Home, longing and belonging among Moroccan migrant women published in 2003. The book offers a case study of Moroccan women and their families who have emigrated to Italy. Salih maps out the multiple and diverse locations (within and outside the physical territory) of Moroccan women's cultural and social experiences and establishes theoretical links between them. On this basis, she argues that they are leading transnational lives – between Morocco and Italy. In other words, Salih argues that Moroccan women engage in transnational social, economic and symbolic activities and relations with both countries. This informs their identities, conceptualisations of home and cultural practices.

According to Salih, these women’s experiences in Italy are strongly shaped by the post-9/11 context they find themselves in, as this event had a decisive impact on Italy’s policies towards immigrants. Moreover, the events have sparked an intense debate about the meaning of “Italianness” and the role of Muslims and Islam in it. As some politicians describe Muslims as being “too different” to be included in Italian society, they are often marginalized. As a response to the experienced marginalization in Italy in addition to the lack of citizenship, Moroccan women turn to their home countries, both, socially and economically. They invest in it in different forms, such as remittances, searching for marriage patterns, and appropriating homes and lives in Italy to reflect Morocco through photos of relatives, television, cuisine, and touristy artifacts.

One specific example of transnationalism, modernity, and identity that is discussed in the book is the question of veiling. Muslim women wearing headscarves is a debated and politicized topic in the European context, as some political parties have openly criticized the practice. The book contributes to this topic by investigating the often overlooked opinions of Muslim women in Europe themselves. Salih highlights that there is a diversity of opinions and attributions to the headscarf by Moroccan women. Some women decide to wear it, as for them the veil is a symbol of modernity and self-empowerment. For them, it symbolizes an alternative morality to the Western one. Other Moroccan women attribute backwardness to veiling and thus criticize their “sisters” for wearing it.

In general, the book advocates for a gendered lens in the study of migration as Salih highlights how the experience of displacement and belonging of Moroccan women is directly tied to their gender. It is the women for example who carry the burden of cultural transmission, which shapes their experience of transnationalism to a high degree. The book’s narrative is dominated by three discourses: gender, modernity, transnationalism and the politics of difference. Generally, the book illustrates the complex and contradictory impacts oftransnationalism on citizenship, the nation state, globalisation and modernity. Eventually, the book aims at unpacking modernist binary oppositions and questioning reified concepts, such as locality, identity, difference and citizenship, as well as the interaction between the global and the local.

Awards

 * Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize, 2009

Selected Publications

 * Salih R. (2001) The backward and the New. National, Postnational and Transnational Islam in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
 * Salih R. (2002) Reformulating tradition and modernity: Moroccan migrant women and the transnational division of ritual space. Global Networks.
 * Salih. R (2003) Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women. London, Routledge.
 * Salih R. (2008) Musulmane Rivelate. Donne, Islam, Modernita. Rome, Carroci.
 * Salih R. (2009) Muslim women, fragmented secularism and the construction of interconnected ‘publics’ in Italy. Social Anthropology.
 * Salih R. and Moors A. (2009) Muslim women in Europe: Secular Normativities, Bodily Performances and Multiple Publics. Social Anthropology.
 * Salih R. (2013) Moroccan Migrant Women: Transnationalism, Nation-States and Gender. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
 * Salih R. (2013) From Bare Lives to Political Agents. Palestinian Refugees as Avant-Garde. Refugee Survey Quarterly.
 * Salih R. and Richter-Devroe S. (2014) Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect. Arab Studies Journal.
 * Salih R. (2017) Bodies that walk, bodies that talk, bodies that love. Palestinian women refugees, affectivity and the politics of the ordinary. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.
 * Salih R. (2018) Il corpo della memoria e la memoria del corpo. Le donne rifugiate e la politica dell'ordinario. DWF.
 * Salih R. and Welchman L.  and Zambelli E. (2020) Rethinking justice beyond human rights. Anti-colonialism and intersectionality in the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement. Mediterranean Politics.
 * Salih R. (2020) The Political Cultures of Palestinian Refugees: Right to Rights and Right to Return. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Forthcoming]