Meryiem Choukri

Vita

Meryem Choukri is a PhD candidate at the Universities Warwick (UK) and Gießen (GER) and works on resistant archives of feminist of colour movements in Germany. She holds an MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy from Goldsmiths University and a BA in Liberal Arts from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Meryem is an affiliated member of the PhDNet Literary and Cultural Studies, co-coordinates the Memory Group in Warwick and is part of the bildungsLab*. Furthermore, she works as a freelance educator and advisor on topics of intersectionality, empowerment and colonialism and is part of the advisory board on decolonisation of the city of Hamburg.

Abstract

This PhD project investigates the archives of resistance built by intersectional feminist activists in Germany. The archives of social movements and activist communities cannot merely be understood as intentional, physical archives. Especially marginalised communities turn to different forms than traditional archives to record and pass on knowledge, collective memories, and experiences, such as art and literature, food, oral history or use social media networks as archives. My research on the sources of knowledge and spaces of memory of radical feminists of colour in Germany will question how activists themselves understand their archives, which meaning they have and how they connect generations and communities. This project is deeply embedded in queer, de- and postcolonial and feminist theories about marginal archives, memory, and knowledge building such as formulated by Sadiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, Fatima El-Tayeb or Patrica Hill Collins. It also engages explicitly with often overlooked German theory buildings around these topics as they were formulated by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche.The work builds on an ethnographic approach and puts the interviews with eight intersectional feminist activists at its centre. While archives are commonly associated with the preservation of hegemonic knowledge in form of records collections, this project will help to shape a better understanding on the functions and forms of resistant knowledge of racialised feminist activists. Archive of resistance are not to be understood as something stable or fixed but can be analysed through different metaphors and images.The dissertation is structured through three figures/metaphors that came up during the research process, which are treasure, Erbe (inheritance/heritage/legacy), and community. These figures help to identify the different temporal, symbolic and emotional aspects of the activist archives and so sharpen the concept of archives of resistance.