Areas of interest and expertise
Gender, Politics, and Development; North African Politics; Social Justice; Al-Hogra; Neoliberal Authoritarianism; Human Rights in Authoritarian Contexts; Feminist Research and other Critical Methodologies and Epistemologies.
Fieldwork
I am a strong proponent of ethnographic field methods in political sciences as well as area studies, enriched with feminist research ethics and other critical methodologies and theories. These provide an epistemological lens through which my research participants narrate their lives. I work with low-income women and men residing in provincial and rural Morocco as well as NGOs serving these communities.
Current research
Under review: Critical Methodologies and Invisible Human Rights Violations: The View from Morocco. In The Politics of Gender and Rights: The Islamic Context, Pardis Esadi Zeidabadi and Nadia Aghtaie (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Manuscript in preparation: Slovenian Development Cooperation through the Prism of Feminist Foreign Policy (in original: Slovensko razvojno sodelovanje skozi prizmo feministične zunanje politike). In Zbornik o etiki v mednarodnih odnostih in slovenski zunanji politiki – Anthology on Ethics in International Relations and Slovenian Foreign Policy). Smiljana Knez (ed.).
Published research
(Please note the different spellings of my name as contained in the different publications. For citation purposes, please use as spelled by the journals/books, though the correct spelling is Katja (name) Žvan Elliott (last name) or Žvan Elliott, Katja. It’s Ž as in Žižek 🙂 )
Monographs
2015 Žvan Elliott, Katja. Modernizing Patriarchy: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Morocco. Austin: University of Texas Press. (Reviewed by the International Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Islamic Law and Society, and Mediterranean Politics)
Morocco is hailed by academics, international NGO workers, and the media as a trailblazer in women’s rights and legal reforms. The country is considered a model for other countries in the Middle East and North African region, but has Morocco made as much progress as experts and government officials claim? In Modernizing Patriarchy, Katja Žvan Elliott examines why women’s rights advances are lauded in Morocco in theory but are often not recognized in reality, despite the efforts of both Islamist and secular feminists.
In Morocco, female literacy rates remain among the lowest in the region; many women are victims of gender-based violence despite legal reforms; and girls as young as twelve are still engaged to adult men, despite numerous reforms. Based on extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork in Oued al-Ouliya, Modernizing Patriarchy offers a window into the life of Moroccan Muslim women who, though often young and educated, find it difficult to lead a dignified life in a country where they are expected to have only one destiny: that of wife and mother. Žvan Elliott exposes their struggles with modernity and the legal reforms that are supposedly ameliorating their lives. In a balanced approach, she also presents male voices and their reasons for criticizing the prevailing women’s rights discourse. Compelling and insightful, Modernizing Patriarchyexposes the rarely talked about reality of Morocco’s approach toward reform.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
2023 Žvan Elliott, Katja. “Positionality, Critical Methodologies, and Pedagogy: Teaching Gender and Politics in Morocco.“ Politics & Gender , First View , pp. 1 – 6.
This article shows how Morocco’s semiauthoritarian political context conditions instructors’ attempts to apply a critical pedagogical approach that focuses on positionality. I do so by introducing my personal story as an entry point to my teaching approach, before engaging with the classroom and the challenges of such an approach.
2020 Žvan Elliott, Katja. ““It’s too much”: Victims of Gender-Based Violence Encounter the Moroccan State.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52:1, pp. 49-66.
By using the narrative approach and linking it to feminist research ethics and critical race methodology, this article seeks to understand how non-literacy and poverty hinder low-income women’s access to justice and how these women experience the Moroccan state. The state here acts as an oppressive and marginalizing entity in women’s lives, but also offers the potential for empowerment. This ethnographic study tells the stories of three victims of gender-based violence to demonstrate that the state needs to (1) set up an efficient and responsive infrastructure for those lacking know-how and money; (2) institute proper training of state agents for implementation of laws and to prevent them from acting on personal opinions and attitudes with regard to women’s rights; and (3) strengthen procedures so that state agents can respond expeditiously to the needs and grievances of citizens.
2015 Žvan Elliott, Katja. “(Dis)Empowering Education: The Case of Morocco.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 44:1-2, pp. 1-42.
This article critically approaches the widely accepted development discourse, which promotes the idea that education, individualized autonomy, and empowerment of women go hand in hand. My ethnographic research in various parts of Morocco since 2009, however, shows that although people generally accept education as a positive and welcome quality of women, there can be negative consequences to being too educated. A combination of pursuing (post-)secondary education while honoring a specific local moral order traps many adult girls (unmarried women) in a space between traditions, symbolized in the perception of what it means to be an ideal woman (wife and mother), and the pressures of modernity, which is understood here as a quest for autonomy and individualized identity through employment and ownership of resources. I argue that the transition from disenfranchisement to emancipation is not as linear as the development discourse suggests and that education is not necessarily the panacea for women’s empowerment. Instead, we need to be cognizant of the wider political and economic structures, such as authoritarianism and neoliberalism, which significantly impact the abilities and choices of individuals, and of women more specifically. My data, collected during various parts of my research work in Morocco, is situated within Paulo Freire’s and Hisham Sharabi’s theories about education in authoritarian contexts, and is coupled with Nelly Stromquist’s definition of genuine empowerment, in order to better understand the reasons behind the slow progress towards women’s empowerment in a developing country.
2014 Zvan Elliott, Katja. “Morocco and Its Women’s Rights Struggle: A Failure to Live Up to Its Progressive Image.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 10:2, pp. 1-30.
This article examines the rarely talked about subtleties of Moroccan reform in the realm of women’s rights and its inadequate fulfillment of obligations to international human rights standards. The Preamble to Morocco’s post-Arab Spring 2011 constitution follows the example of its 1996 version, in which the state declared its “determination to abide by the universally recognised human rights.” However, while the state is often hailed in the international forums and media as a true trendsetter in the realm of women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa region, this analysis of the much celebrated Family Code and its two main goals-“doing justice to women” and “preserving men’s dignity”-and of the regime’s ambivalent discourse on gender equality as defined by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) paints a more realistic picture. Both of these cases indicate that the state is failing to ameliorate the legal position of women and to consider women as autonomous and individual human beings with intrinsic rights not contingent upon first fulfilling their customary obligations. I contend, therefore, that the way the reformed Family Code has formulated its goals and the way that the law and the state continue to conceptualize a woman go against the main principle of individuality contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and CEDAW to which Morocco has continually committed itself, at least on paper.
2009 Zvan Elliott, Katja. “Reforming the Moroccan Personal Status Code: A Revolution for Whom?” Mediterranean Politics 14:2, pp. 213-27.
This article addresses the reform of the Moroccan Personal Status Code and its shortcomings. It argues that despite the success of the reform campaign, a number of problems prevent the new Family Code from having a proper and lasting effect on Moroccan society. The article explores these issues, which are of a legal as well as a social nature, and contends that in order for the reformed Code to be fully implemented and gender equality to be instituted in all spheres of public and private life, an all-encompassing economic and educational reform has to go hand in hand with social changes.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
2018 Žvan Elliott, Katja. “Women’s Political Rights in Morocco.” In Global Handbook on Women’s Political Rights. Netina Tan, Mona Lena Krook, and Susan Francheschet (eds.). Palgrave MacMillan UK.
2012 Zvan Elliott, Katja. “The Moudawana and Rural Marital Relationships: Reformed or Resolute?” In Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies. Chitra Raghavan and James Levine (eds). Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press.
Policy Papers
2023 Sole author of the policy paper Morocco – Analysis of the Situation in the Country and Migration Issues (in original: Maroko – Analiza stanja v državi in migracijske problematike). Policy paper prepared for the Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia.
2023 Principal author of the official Guidelines for the Mainstreaming of Gender Equality in Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid of the Republic of Slovenia (in original: Smernice za vključevanje enakosti spolov v mednarodno razvojno sodelovanje in humanitarno pomoč Republike Slovenije), adopted by the Minister of European and Foreign Affairs.
Book Reviews
2019 Žvan Elliott, Katja. Book review: “Femininity, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Morocco and Hollywood: The Negated Sex” (author: Osire Glacier). Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 15:2.
2015 Žvan Elliott, Katja. Book review: “The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival” (author: Elena Fiddiyan-Qasmiyeh). International Journal of Middle East Studies 47:1.
2008 Elliott, Katja Zvan. Book review: “Muslim Women On the Move: Moroccan Women and French Women of Moroccan Origins Speak Out” (author: Doris Gray). The Journal of North African Studies 13:4.
Katja Žvan Elliott, DPhil (Oxon) 