Diana is a feminist researcher and gender equality specialist from Cairo, Egypt. She has 12 years of experience in gender and development which includes supporting gender integration at the programmatic and organisational levels, advocacy, project design and implementation, monitoring and reporting, and programme evaluation. Recently, she has been a research fellow at The Arab Council of Social Science, where she published a paper titled ‘Everydayness as a Site of Gendered Resistance in Garden City: Revisiting Ethics and Methods in a Messy Field´.
Thematically, she engages with issues of gender-based violence, women’s economic empowerment, and gender-responsive workplace policies. Her technical interventions cover the prevention and service provision of GBV, forced child marriage, domestic violence, and combating sexual harassment. Additionally, she has worked on improving gender inclusion and diversity in the private sector through workplace policies and explored gender equality in the green economy sector and entrepreneurship. Her work on gender inequality at national level covered different governorates outside Cairo such as Qena, Minya, Beni Suef, Luxor and Aswan as well as collaborating on a regional level. She has a special interest in engaging with public policy from a gender perspective and has produced publications on this topic such as ‘Towards Better Gender Data for Enhancing Gender Equity in Education’ and ‘After COVID-19: Mitigating Domestic Gender-based Violence in Egypt in Times of Emergency’.
As a feminist oral historian, she has worked on documenting the Egyptian feminist movement, producing feminist knowledge in Arabic, and archive building. In this area, she published a paper titled ‘Narrating Gender in Egypt's Public Sphere: The Archive of Women’s Oral History’. Diana is also passionate about art, painting, and exhibition curation from an anthropological perspective. During her time in The Women and Memory Forum, she supported the development of a few exhibits and short films based on women’s stories and experiences in the public space.
Diana holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Language from Cairo University and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The American University in Cairo AUC. Her research project ‘Negotiation of Space in Garden City: Urban Securitization, Gender, Everydayness and Affective Encounters’ explored ethnographic accounts of urban securitization, its resistance post-2011, and related affective encounters.
In my work on the history of the feminist movement, inter-generational feminist dialogue has been a great source of inspiration, allowing me to understand generational resistance in fighting structural inequalities by attending to people’s narratives and women’s experiences and lived realities and situating the social happenings and social history of gendered resistance within macro-history of change.Diana Magdy