Title: Boundaries of Contention: Gender Mechanisms of Rural Discontent in Post-Uprising Tunisia
Expected Completion Date: 2026
PhD Supervisor & Co-Supervisor : Elisabeth Prugl & Christiana Parreira
How do gendered relations of production and reproduction shape contention? In postrevolutionary Tunisia, conflict over revolutionary aspirations yet to materialize has become a defining feature of the nation’s countryside. In protests, sit-ins, and other displays of discontent, smallholders, agricultural laborers, the landless, and the land poor have taken to the streets to reiterate and assert the demands of a once-revolutionary moment. Amid these campaigns, rural women have occupied vastly different positions. Some have thrown rocks, others were seldom visible, but all have experienced the gender-disparate outcomes of agrarian change that decades of scholarly production have elucidated. What remains undertheorized, however, is how gendered relations of labor feed into discontent. In this dissertation project, I explore gendered labor as a relational mechanism with (1) the potential to elucidate differences in collective action participation (2) and add novel dimensions to our understanding of the grievances animating campaigns. Guided by a social reproductive lens—a theoretical approach centering the interrelations of households, markets, and the state in mediating gendered labor regimes— I argue that the way in which (potential) challengers are positioned vis-à-vis these institutions shapes the way in which they go in and out of claim making; or that gendered structural positioning of challengers generates forces that push people to varying expressions of discontent.
Dhouha Djerbi is a PhD student at the International Relations/Political Science department and an affiliate with the Gender Center. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance (cum laude), a B.A. in Gender, Sexuality, and Society, and Psychology from the American University of Paris (summa cum laude), and a certificate in Research in Political Economy from the International Development Economics Associates. Dhouha is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for Maghreb Studies in Tunis. She is a host for the New Books in Gender Studies series of the New Books Network.
Dhouha’s research explores gendered labor relations within the context of agrarian transformations and rural movements in postrevolutionary Tunisia. Her research methodology is deeply rooted in ethnographic principles, often involving hands-on experiences working on various farms across diverse regions of Tunisia. Her fieldwork, which she started in the summer of 2023, is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, l’Institut de Recherche sur Le Maghreb Contemporain, and the Project on Middle East Political Science.