Zahra Ali Awarded $450K Carnegie Corporation Grant to Continue Work in Iraq
April 10, 2024
Zahra Ali, Assistant Professor in Rutgers University–Newark's Department of Sociology and Anthropology, was recently awarded a three-year, $450,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support her ongoing Critical Studies of Iraq (CSI) initiative.
CSI, which Ali started in spring 2022 with initial support from Carnegie, leverages partnerships between academic institutions and civil society organizations in Iraq to foster research in the social sciences there—and in women, feminist and gender studies.
Academia and research institutions in Iraq have suffered due to decades of war, particularly the devastating US invasion and occupation of 2003, and years of economic sanctions that have impacted the entire education system there. Ali’s initiative addresses these structural, political and infrastructural challenges by helping to develop scholarship that can bear fruit for people in Iraq and bridge the gap between academia and civil society.