Khaoula Bengezi

Khaoula Bengezi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and a graduate associate at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Currently Khaoula is researching global responses to climate change in the Sahara Desert through clean energy technologies. She is particularly interested in examining how environmental expertise are constructed, legitimized and articulated in environmental development projects in North Africa through a multi-scalar case study approach. Her work centres the experiences of local communities, particularly women and how the construction of climate mitigation technologies have affected their ability to survive in the desert. Khaoula’s approaches are informed by an array of intersecting interdisciplinary approaches including environmental international relations, decolonial political ecology and feminist political economy. Moreover, for the past three years she has been the program coordinator for Righting Relations Hamilton, a movement of adult educators and community organizers who work towards decolonization and social change on Turtle Island. She is also a founding member of the SWANA Feminist Collective aimed at uplifting the voices of the people of the global majority by creating the space for epistemological and methodological interventions in the study of the SWANA region that are informed by feminist, anti-capitalist, and decolonial frameworks.