Palestinian academic Dr Ashjan Ajour honoured with Europe’s Emma Goldman Award for research on feminism and inequality

Palestinian sociologist Dr Ashjan Ajour who is based in the United Kingdom has been awarded the 2025 European Emma Goldman Award in recognition of her groundbreaking research on feminism and social inequality. The award is granted annually by the FLAX Foundation to scholars whose work demonstrates originality and significant contributions to the study of gender and social justice across Europe.

Dr Ajour received the award in Vienna, Austria describing the occasion as “an inspiring opportunity to connect with fellow researchers from across Europe and to exchange critical academic perspectives”.

This recognition comes amid profound personal and collective loss. It coincided with Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the destruction of her family home the displacement of her relatives and the loss of her father in Gaza in 2025. Dr Ajour dedicated the award to her father, Najy Ajour, who was always proud of her and whose life was taken by what she describes as an integrated system of genocide: siege, forced displacement, famine, and the denial of life-saving medical care. His death, she notes, is not merely a personal loss, but a reflection of how colonial violence dismantles families, time and the possibility of a future.

Reflecting on this moment Dr Ajour said:

“Knowledge is not separate from politics or from colonial violence. While I was being honoured for my intellectual work, my family was being stripped of our home, and my father was being besieged by hunger, displacement and the denial of medical care until his death. Knowledge itself can be an act of resistance, and continuing to research and write is a form of steadfastness. They will not break our spirits even if they destroy our homes and our city and kill our loved ones. In my father’s name and in the name of all those we have lost I continue not as an individual achievement, but as an act of survival, memory and responsibility”.

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Dr Ajour’s research foregrounds the lived experiences of Palestinian women under settler colonialism examining forms of social and political resilience, the everyday challenges imposed by occupation and siege and their impact on women’s economic, social and bodily rights. Her work also raises critical questions about the relationship between knowledge and struggle and the role of feminist scholarship in confronting colonial violence and injustice.

This award marks a significant contribution to Palestinian presence in global academia and highlights the role of Palestinian scholars in advancing critical, ethical and decolonial knowledge internationally.

Dr Ajour previously received the Palestine Book Award in 2022, organized by Middle East Monitor (MEMO) for her book Reclaiming Humanity in the Palestinian Hunger Strike Experience: The Revolutionary Self and the Decolonisation of the Body. The award recognized her sustained engagement with questions of resistance, embodiment and justice, further affirming her contribution to Palestinian scholarship and critical feminist research.

Dr Ajour earned her MA with distinction in Gender and Development Studies from Birzeit University in 2012 where she also worked as a part-time lecturer at the Institute of Women’s Studies. Her master’s thesis was published in 2014 by Muwatin – The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy and Human Rights under the title Representations of Power and Knowledge in Liberal Feminist Organising Discourse. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019.

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