Congratulations to Masuma Moravej who is this year’s recipient of the EiCE SIG Travel Award!

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For Masuma Moravej, life has been a combination of luck and hard work. After gaining a master’s degree in Communication from University of Ottawa in Canada, she succeeded in gaining a Fulbright fellowship to pursue her doctorate degree. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Comparative and International Education at Lehigh University in the USA. Masuma’s research interests lie at the intersection of higher education, gender, empowerment, and contextualization. Her dissertation research is investigating how higher education might contribute to one’s empowerment or disempowerment in a conflict-affected context. She aims to contribute to the betterment of Afghan women’s lives by investigating whether and how education contributes to women’s empowerment in Afghan society. As far as women’s rights are concerned, contexts such as Afghanistan, a patriarchal, traditional and in-conflict country, differ in significant ways from many similar countries because of its historical state-building background and its geopolitical location. Masuma believes in a country such as Afghanistan where geopolitics and international aid take a more direct hand in the process of state-building, the gender relations are more complex.

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This award was deferred following the 2021 vCIES virtually conference.