This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. In recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as who they are unique and unrepeatable human beings and not as what they are objectified refugees, victims or stateless subjects.

Womens stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and womens lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position.

These stories that have now been collected, transcribed and analysed; they have created a rich archive of uprooted womens experiences and have brought forward a wide range of new ideas that will be presented and discussed in the book:

Decolonizing feminist theoryMobility assemblages and geographies of nomadismThe art of listening to fragmented narratives and the labour of translationCrossing borders and inhabiting borderlandsRadical solitude and radical hopeFeminist genealogies of labour under conditions of forced displacementThe force of political narratives through the figure of Antigone?Education for hopeImagining the non-nomad
4 narrated stories will also be presented in full interwoven in the theoretical discussions of the book, thus opening up a dialogic space between theoretical reflections and diffractions, and narratives of lived experiences.

Maria Tamboukou is professor of feminist studies at the University of East London and has held visiting research positions in a number of institutions. Her research activity develops in the areas of philosophies andepistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics and archival research. She is the author and editor of 12 books and numerous journal articles. See the authors website for more details on research projects and publications:www.tamboukou.org

Introduction: The making of a book in dialogue with the real

Chapter 1: Mobility assemblages and geographies of nomadism

Chapter 2: Who are you? The art of listening

Chapter 3: Crossing borders and inhabiting borderlands

Interlude I: Nadias story

Chapter 4: Feminist genealogies of labour under conditions of forced displacement

Interlude II: Somis story

Chapter 5: Thinking with Antigone: political narratives of humanistic agonism

Interlude III: Hannas story

Chapter 6: Education for hope

Chapter 7: Imagining the non-nomad

Conclusion: Decolonizing feminist theories