Standing before the defense committee for my PhD dissertation was an image I once aspired to—yet one I often doubted I would ever reach.
Inside me, I was never sure if I was adequate, if I fit into the scholarly world. I still don’t. But the challenge itself was what mattered. It began as a simple idea: I am someone who breathes and feeds on reading and writing—why not academize ideas and formalize them in a writer’s spirit of academia?
Of course, that is easier said than walked through.
Five years ago, I embarked on this journey, challenging not just my ability to write academically but also academia itself—its structures, its limitations, its expectations. I wanted to test the boundaries of what a free-handed academic exploration could look like. I was, by all means, blessed to have caught the attention of my supervisor. After all, if not for a Catalan daring heart willing to join me in this adventure, who else could?
Little did I know back then. And yet, as I try to reflect on this experience, I realize that from the moment I first stepped into the Philosophy Department at UAB, I felt that this was going to be an enabling and embracing environment.
Of course, there were as many ups as there were downs. Each time I felt I had finally reached somewhere, I would look for the closest place to hide, feeling stupid and irrelevant. Yet, something in my mind needed to be explored. I also did not know that the intellectual exercise I was playing with would turn into a lived reality in these very days.
But somehow, that was what I wanted—an academic work that speaks to life. A work that engages with real-life experiences, rather than merely theorizing them in abstraction.
My dissertation, A Gendered Palestinization of Identity: An Arab Philosophy and Colonial-Modernity Perspective, explored the ways in which identity is shaped, constrained, and weaponized under colonial and patriarchal structures. I introduced Palestinization as an analytical tool—not just as a political condition but as an epistemic one, a process through which identities are erased, manipulated, and regulated. I examined how this process is deeply gendered, particularly in the ways Palestinian women experience oppression through multiple, intersecting forces: Israeli colonial rule, patriarchal norms, and internal governance structures. My research sought to bridge disciplines—feminist thought, Arab philosophy, and decolonial critique—to rethink not just identity, but the very frameworks through which we understand resistance and justice.
Through my life as a student, I was never “good enough.” Or at least, that was how I often felt. I wasn’t the top of my class, nor did I fit the mold of the ideal student. But I grew. I moved from fair to acceptable, from good to very good—and now, to have reached excellent in my PhD feels like an accomplishment unlike any other. Not because of the title, but because it expresses the real me as a student. It reflects a journey of persistence, of refusing to be defined by expectations, of pushing through every doubt. And that is perhaps the most rewarding part of it all.
By the time I reached the final point of this expedition, I felt like I had come full circle. What once felt like mountains to climb and valleys to descend no longer mattered; instead, I saw a horizon. It felt like a Sufi dancer spinning in an ascension toward something greater—a moment of oneness with my work, so deeply immersed in me that I could no longer see the world except through it. How could it have been otherwise, when my research was rooted in gender, identity, Arab philosophy, and the Palestinian cause?
As I stood before the jury, I was speaking myself out. That power—of being one’s own self, unfiltered and unrestrained—is unbeatable. I had a carefully prepared presentation, structured to prevent my anxiety from unraveling my words. But as I spoke, I realized I was embodying my own approach—threading together philosophy, situated knowledges, and borderlands thinking, weaving intersections like stitches in an embroidery that could never be unraveled. This was me, no matter how much I tried to position myself outside of it.
It was such a moment—one I do not know if I have ever experienced before. A moment of beauty, of numbness with full control, of heightened awareness of everything around me, yet feeling nothing. Every voice and word mattered, but I was unable to process the feeling. Maybe, if I could ever capture the moment of a child emerging from the womb, looking around in a mix of bewilderment and discovery—that was me. It felt great, yet I could not fully understand it.
As I listened to the jury, absorbing how they engaged with my work—even when some interpreted it in ways completely foreign to me—I felt something profound. Their engagement with the text mattered. Nadia the writer was sitting there, conversing. It was not Nadia the PhD candidate defending her dissertation.
To be fully yourself, and to fill that space with the greatest things of you—this, above all, is the greatest achievement of this journey.