Nada Al-Hudaid

I decided to be a Traces.Dreams ambassador because I meet many great people and it is a great opportunity to highlight some of the research topics that have potential for making a change.

I am going to share stories about people, films, and projects that inspire me and help other people in various ways.
I am specializing in the anthropology of religious art and visual representations.

I am a social anthropology PhD with visual media candidate at the University of Manchester. My research is a study of a sub-cultural groups in Kuwait who create rites that enable them to serve the cause of Ahl Al-Bayt within their community, nationally and transnationally with other Shi‘a elsewhere, while striving to maintain their connection with their religious history and to keep certain traditions alive through new forms of adaptations. More specifically, I focused on pious Shi‘a artists and their religious work in Kuwait. This work is based on one year ethnographic research in Kuwait in 2015. Most academic work on Shi‘a are on people who are politically charged or live in an unstable political environments. This, coupled with mainstream media representation of Shi‘a, provide unbalanced perspectives of Shi‘a who live elsewhere. Therefore, my research provide an alternative narrative of Shi‘a who live in a stable and rich country.

Further to my ethnographic research experience, I did a two years masters in visual culture studies at the Australian National University. Also, I did ethnographic research for nine months with an aboriginal center in Canberra and focused on the challenges of higher education among Australian aboriginal students.

In addition to my academic work, I am a photographer and filmmaker who worked in producing and directing various short narrative and documentary films. My last work before taking a break to focus on PhD is called Hijabi Girls which went to many film festivals around the world including Cannes film corner. It was also featured on BBC three website and shown on TV as part of a documentary called Through Your Lens in 2015 about emerging filmmakers in the UK.