Keynote Speakers
We are exicted to share the keynote speakers at the 12th European Feminist Research Conference 2025, with further keynote speakers to be announced soon.
Anna Younes
Anna Younes is a German Palestinian scholar that has also curated the first transnational and transdisciplinary month-long Palestinian arts festival in Germany in 2016. Her focus rests on what she has coined the "War on Antisemitism" in her 2015 PhD dissertation, which dealt with Germany's stance toward "fighting Antisemitism". Since then she has developed her concept further and places it within trajectories of counterinsurgency wars in a new post-WWII world order, framed by tactics used in the War on Drugs and most prominently the War on Terror. Younes thinks transnationally and transhistorically. Currently, she researches the afterlives of settler colonialism in the Dutch Caribbean and works with the ELSC - the European Legal Support Center defending pro-Palestinian activists and scholars in Europe. Her work zooms in on settler colonial theories, psychoanalysis and race critical theories and can be found on academia.edu or her personalised website: www.annaestheryounes.net.
Layal Ftouni
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently working on a book project on the 'reproduction of life' in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation, both human and environmental, in the settler colonial context of Palestine. In 2021, she received the Dutch Research Council VENI grant to support this project. Before joining Utrecht University, she lectured at SOAS, University of London, and earned her PhD from the University of Westminster. Her writing is featured in a variety of publications, the most recent of which is: "They make death, and I am the labor of Life": Palestinian Prisoners Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life" published in Critical Times (2024). She is the co-editor of Arab Subcultures (2017) published by Bloomsbury Press and is on the Editorial Board of Lateral, a peer-review open-access journal of the Cultural Studies Association. As well as her educational and research work, Layal is also a founding member of Dutch Scholars for Palestine, a network of educational workers across Dutch Universities committed to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.
Gražina Bielousova
Dr. Gražina Bielousova (Duke University, 2022) is an anthropologist of religion and politics working at the intersection of race, religion, and gender in east Europe. Her current project and forthcoming book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) focus on leftist feminists in east European countries that find themselves under the threat of Russia's military expansionist politics, with particular attention to Ukraine. Gražina's other academic interests include de- and post- colonial theory, global raciality, and socioeconomic inequality. She is currently a researcher at Vilnius University and a lecturer at Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania).