<p><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Sohaila Abdulali was sexually assaulted as a teenager in India, promised to remain silent in return for her life, and has not stopped talking since. Her work as an activist, a counselor, and an author has taken her around the world. </span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Drawing from her own experiences and those of thousands of other survivors, Abdulali inspires audiences to reconsider the way we talk about sexual assault and gender roles in society. Knowledgeable without being didactic, serious without being grim, and always approachable, she focuses on raising awareness about consent, sexuality, trauma, and living with optimism. </span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Her 2018 book </span><i style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape </i><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">was designated one of </span><i style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Publisher Weekly’s</i><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);"> “Best Books of 2018.” It is out worldwide in seven languages. A seasoned journalist, Abdulali also is the author of the bestselling novels </span><i style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">The Madwoman of Jogare </i><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">and </span><i style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Year of the Tiger</i><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">. She is a graduate of both Brandeis and Stanford Universities.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Sohaila is the former coordinator of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, an organization dedicated to providing resources, advocacy, and education. She has won two Ford Foundation grants. The first award was for researching, producing, and distributing children’s books on women’s health in India that were later translated and sold in four languages, and the second for an ethnography on the aboriginal people of Western India titled </span><i style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Bye Bye Mati: A Memoir in a Monsoon Landscape.</i></p><p><span style="color: rgb(124, 131, 137);">Sohaila’s lively, thought-provoking events, both lectures and workshops, include a packed house at the Sydney Opera House, a concert hall in Utrecht, Netherlands, an auditorium of high-level corporate executives in a multinational corporation in Mumbai, a Minister of Justice at the Hague, and countless schools and universities on several continents. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: black;"> </span></p>
Author and survivor advocate
<ul><li><strong>On Trauma: Writing, Speaking, Healing, Teaching</strong></li><li>Writing and speaking are powerful tools, both for personal healing and moving society. This session explores how we can use the tools of literature, history and narrative to communicate powerfully about taboo or difficult subjects. </li><li><strong>Getting to Justice</strong></li><li>When we talk about justice in the context of rape or any other kind of sexual abuse, things can get murky very quickly. There are no clear answers. We need to keep asking questions. How do we approach justice when the needs of one victim might be counter to the needs of society? The criminal justice system is flawed, but we have very few alternatives. This talk addresses how we cannot separate our ideas of justice from our ideas of dignity, agency, and gender. And we cannot separate them from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Abdulali shares her experiences as a witness to many different forms of addressing the aftermath of assault. </li><li><strong>Consent: It’s Never as Simple as “Yes Means Yes and No Means No”</strong></li><li>While the past years have shown a cultural shift in how the public perceives the issue of rape, the addressing the problem at its root involves clearly defining the nature of consent. In this talk, Abdulali shares her insights on how to determine agency, balance power, and bring clarity to the nuances of sexual interaction.</li><li><strong>Rape and Intersectionality</strong></li><li>In this presentation, Abdulali addresses the broader socioeconomic factors that come into play when considering the issue of sexual assault. Like all societal problems, occurrences of sexual assault are often affected by race, class, economics, and gender relations. Abdulali encourages audiences to take a sociological approach, and to understand that the issue of rape doesn’t belong in a cultural vacuum.</li></ul>