Disrupting Myths & Celebrating Muslim-American Women
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
ASL interpretation provided.
PRESENTATION SLIDES: Disrupting Myths and Celebrating Muslim American Women [PDF]
Too often, narratives about Muslim women — in public media as well as in progressive spaces — are one-dimensional, proliferating stereotypes and denying Muslim women’s agency.
Noor Mir
Noor is a skilled campaign and direct action strategist based in Washington, DC. For over a decade, she has coordinated winning advocacy campaigns for national and international organizations. Noor is a first-generation immigrant from Islamabad, Pakistan. She started her career in college, working for Kimberle Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum to design popular education tools to explain intersectionality to young people in New York public schools. Noor then launched and led a global campaign against lethal drone warfare. Both of these experiences early on in Noor’s organizing career grew her skills in multicultural storytelling, creative popular education and coalition-building. Noor then led the human rights organization Amnesty International’s global campaigns on police accountability, abolishing the death penalty and ending gun violence. Since 2016, Noor has been a principal at the consulting firm DC Action Lab, where she’s launched and coordinated countless coalitions and trained thousands of people in nonviolent direct action. Noor earned her Bachelors in Political Science, French and Post-Colonial Literature from Vassar College and is currently completing a Public Policy master’s degree at Georgetown University.
Kifah Shah
Kifah Shah is a campaign and communications strategist. She is currently a consultant at the reimagine collective, a faculty member at Columbia University, a co-facilitator of RISE Organizing, and an executive coach with the Movement Voter Project. Her work spans several places and spaces: migration in the EU with the Migration Policy Group in Brussels; research on economic empowerment with USAID in Karachi; labor rights with Unite HERE! and CLUE in Los Angeles; and civic engagement with MPower Change. Recently, she co-authored Hold the Line: a Guide to Defending Democracy, which predicted the scenarios witnessed surrounding the 2020 general election. In her spare time, Kifah overindulges in chocolate, works out to get stronger, and coordinates teach-ins on organizing with her friends and co-founders at rad organizing. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, TED, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, NPR, and more. Kifah holds a Masters in Public Administration in Economic Policy from The London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
