Nominees for Graduate Section Co-Presidents (2024-2027)

Reasons for Nomination

Yara has been keen to foster a sense of community among graduate students from and/or working on the Middle East, particularly the Arab region, and especially given the current climate of repression dominating the UK. She aims to expand a supportive, engaged, and tight-knit network of graduate students, and comrades, who can lean on one other for support, exchange of ideas, and resources, as well as establish a mechanism through which to support upcoming graduate students from/aiming to work on the region. As a Lebanese graduate student in social psychology, Yara also has plans for outreach initiatives to bring about a more equitable representation of graduate students across fields as well as regions, thus promoting more opinions and voices among the graduate section. Further, as an organiser with various political movements in the UK (pro-Palestine movements) and Lebanon (secular movements), Yara is also interested in bringing her campaign efforts to BRISMES, particularly in support of the precarity of graduate students from the region as well as the politics of repression within academia. Moreover, Yara’s extensive experience representing her peers (as a cohort representative since her undergraduate up to her current PhD) as well as her experience leading the Psychology Society as a student at the American University of Beirut, promise to bring in an inclusive, collaborative, and proactive approach to the graduate section co-presidency team.