Dr. Amal Elsana Alhjooj, an Indigenous Bedouin Palestinian academic and activist born in Israel, is currently the Founding Executive Director of the nonprofit organization PLEDJ (Promoting Leadership for Empowerment, Development, and Justice). She is the author of Hope is a Woman’s Name, a personal memoir that recounts her experiences growing up and her activism through the lens of intersectionality, navigating between individual, social, and political identities and the systems of power within which they exist.
Dr. Elsana obtained a PhD in Social Work from McGill University in 2017, where she explored the inherent tensions between service provision and advocacy in social service organizations within the context of Indigenous minorities, for which she received the Directors Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Research. In 2019, Dr. Elsana conducted postdoctoral research at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, focusing on the barriers faced and strategies employed by Bedouin women’s organizations in Israel. Following this, she was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (2020-2021), where she studied the roles and challenges of civil society organizations in conflict zones.
Over the past three decades, Dr. Elsana has led a movement for feminist, indigenous, solutions-oriented community organizing and policy change advocacy in the Middle East, and Canada. She has worked with marginalized minorities locally and internationally to organize against and challenge exclusionary policies, and to implement sustainable solutions for social change. This rich practical experience feeds into her research interests, which lie at the intersection of international social work, community organizing, community building, justice, and peacebuilding. Her work builds on the importance of strengthening links between academia and local communities, and the role that social work can play in empowering the most marginalized among us to lead social change, at local and global levels. She is the recipient of many awards including the recipient of the Genius 100 Visionaries of the Future (2017), and the New Israel Fund’s Human Rights Award (2013), and was previously nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2006).
Research Interests
- Social change service organizations
- Community organizing and Policy change.
- Advocacy and Activisms
- Human Rights, Justice and Peacebuilding
- Gender and development
- Social Work in conflict settings
- Indigenous social work; Research and knowledge-making
- Global indigeneity and intersectionality