The Medal for Excellence in Feminist Scholarship is awarded annually by the Centre for Feminist Research and honours the outstanding contributions of York University faculty Ena Dua, Bonita Lawrence and Meg Luxton. Through their anti-racist, Indigenous feminist and feminist scholarship, they have transformed our understanding of women's everyday realities and struggles for more just relationships.
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Congratulations to our inaugural winner, Dr. Nahla Abdo!
Dr. Nahla Abdo is an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist feminist activist and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. She has extensive publications on racialized capitalism, settler colonialism and genocide, focusing on Palestine and Turtle Island. Among her recent publications: “Israel’s Settler Colonialism and the Genocide in Gaza” (Studies in Political Economy, 2024) and “The Palestine Exception, Racialization and Invisibilization: From Palestine to Turtle Island” (Critical Sociology, 2023). Along with her numerous articles, Professor Abdo has published and co-edited several influential books, including An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (2018, co-edited) with an Arabic translation recently released in Amman, Jordan (2025). Other notable works include Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle (2014), translated into French (2019); Women in Israel: Race, Gender, and Citizenship (2011); Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges (2004, co-edited), which was translated into Kurdish and Turkish; and Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002, co-edited).
About the Decision
Dr. Abdo was nominated by her colleagues Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan, Danielle Dinovelli-Lang, Azar Masoumi, Carolyn Ramzy, Vivian Solana and Rania Tfaily.
The CFR's adjudication committee was moved by all the nomination letters received in support of feminist scholars across the country and by the expansive range of impactful research, creative production, and public, media and community engagement displayed by the nominees. In this competitive process, Dr. Abdo’s scholarship on race, gender, class, and anti-colonial studies—with a specific focus on Palestinian and comparative settler colonial studies, racial capitalism, and the dynamics of gendered resistance—stood out as particularly impressive. The committee noted that in addition to several published books, reports, and articles—frequently translated into multiple languages—Dr. Abdo maintains a strong public intellectual presence, and policy and activist engagement, especially with Palestinian human rights. Dr. Abdo’s nominators and CFR’s adjudicators alike emphasized that her work is profoundly meaningful in today’s global context.
Congratulations to Dr. Nahla Abdo!
“Professor Abdo’s long and distinguished academic career is rooted in her decades of feminist, anti-colonial, and antiracist advocacy and activism in Canada and the Middle East. She also has been a role-model for us, her junior colleagues, in the kind of intellectual commitment, personal integrity, and relentless courage necessary to practice truly feminist, anti-colonial, and antiracist scholarship in these reactionary times.”
Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan, Danielle Dinovelli-Lang, Azar Masoumi, Carolyn Ramzy, Vivian Solana and Rania Tfaily.
Nominations for the 2025-26 National Medal competition will open September 1, 2025.