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Yasemin Ipek is an Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. Her research is informed by her long-standing interests in transnational humanitarianism and NGOs; activism and social movements; and everyday enactments of ethics, Islam, nationalism, and sectarianism in the Middle East. She is currently working on two projects. Her first project, based on her fieldwork in Lebanon between 2012 and 2015, examines how the Syrian refugee crisis has transformed national identity and post-civil war efforts towards peace-building in Lebanon. In her new research project, tentatively titled Islamic Humanitarianism: Transnational Care Networks in the Middle East, she studies Muslim aid workers in Istanbul and Beirut, and explores how piety interacts with secular and cosmopolitan discourses to shape global migration, refugees, and humanitarianism.

Yasemin Ipek received her PhD degree in Anthropology from Stanford University. She also received a second doctoral degree in the Department of Political Science, Bilkent University, where she studied political memoirs and conservative nationalism in early Republican Turkey. Her work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals such as Turkish Studies and edited volumes such as Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era. She teaches on a wide range of subjects such as globalization, anthropology of the Middle East, refugees and humanitarianism, youth, activism and social movements, and qualitative research methods.

Heba El-Shazli is Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on International Relations Theory, Politics, Government and Society of the Middle East, and Political Islam. She holds a Ph.D. in Government and International Affairs, from Virginia Tech, and a Master of Arts degree in International Relations from Georgetown University. She is an Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University’s Master’s Degree Program at the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, and has held previous teaching positions at the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Tech. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

El-Shazli has 28 years of experience in civic and union organizing, institution building, leadership skills training, labor education and training methodologies, political advocacy, and development, implementation and management of international programs. Her work with trade unions, political institutions, political parties and NGOs has taken her to Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucuses, Iran, South America, Western Europe, the United States, and to the Middle East and North Africa. She was the Regional Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa programs at the Solidarity Center, AFL-CIO from September 2004 until June 2011. El-Shazli was the Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs from 2001 until 2004. During her tenure at NDI, she served as NDI’s Resident Representative in Beirut, where she implemented programs to help develop and empower civil society organizations in Lebanon and in the region. She has also worked at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (The Solidarity Center), the international institute of the American labor movement, the AFL-CIO from 1994 to 2000, where she managed programs in eight Arab countries. She previously served as the Free Trade Union Institute’s Senior Program Officer for Central and Eastern Europe from 1987 to 1994, during which time she developed and implemented educational, training and financial assistance programs for trade unions in the region. During her tenure with FTUI, El-Shazli responded to regional needs with programs addressing worker rights, gender empowerment, communications, training of trainers (TOT), vocational and leadership skills training.