Shahd Alshammari
Biographic Data
| ID | 1639550 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shahd Alshammari |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shahd |
| FAMILY NAME | Alshammari |
| SIGNATURE | ALSHAMMARI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Gulf University for Science & Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2364-3231 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Cognitive Narratology and Disability in Taha Hussein’s Canonical Literary Works
A Corpus-Based Exploration of Debates over Helen Keller’s Work and Public Image
Helen Keller’s work has been lauded for confronting disability and battling social inequity but also criticised for its racial orientation, Western prejudice, and fixation on disability. This stylometric study used corpus tools to identify genre-specific linguistic patterns and stylistic alterations within Keller’s oeuvre. A sociographic examination of the most frequent n-grams reveals how Keller’s deafblindness anchors both the positive and nega…
Stigmatizing Views of Ill Women in Kuwaiti Memoir of Arthritis
This study explored the portrayal of illness and disability in Kuwaiti author Kulthoum Dashti’s memoir Almost Faded: Rheumatoid Arthritis Journey specifically focusing on how health-based thematic categorizations intersect with perceptions of the external world. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-2015) software program, a corpus specific to the novel was analyzed, retrieving thematic categories and contrasting them with the psychol…
Writing Disability and Breaking Language
Safe Corridor by Jan Dost (review)
Gulf Women’s Lives
Gulf Women’s Lives
This edited volume investigates how Gulf women negotiate spaces of dissent through their writing. The focus on women’s narratives offers critical perspectives on how women in the Gulf construct themselves as gendered selves and authors, how they exist within public and private spaces, and how voice and agency are part of their conversations in various spheres. In the process, the book engages readers in theoretical reflections and conversations w…
Gulf Women's Lives
From Stigma to Speech
Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa (review)
Writing and righting disability representation
Limited literature is available from Arab women authors on the topic of disability, and even less interest is found when looking at the publishing industry. This autoethnographic paper examines the role of the publishing industry in promoting underrepresented voices and questions who determines which voices are important and deserving of publication. This article intends to highlight the obstacles that disabled scholars and individuals confront i…
Illness and Disability
Illness and Disability Shahd Alshammari (bio) Herewith a list of recent books about illness and disability and the transformative changes that happen to us during these journeys with the body. Some of these works are fictional, and others are memoirs. AZIZ MOHAMMED The Critical Case of a Man Called K Trans. Humphrey Davies Hoopoe Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this work is now translated into English and charts a youn…
Hip-Hop in the Arab World and Kuwait
It is no wonder that young generations in the globe as well as in the Arab World are attracted to hip hop music that absorbs a load of incompatible emotions in a world of many conflicts and contradictions. The American roots of hip hop culture attract the young generation in the Arab World. This article examines examples from Arab and Gulf hip hop culture. A successful and distinguished Kuwaiti hip hop duo, Sons of Yusuf, has been interviewed to …
Literary and Cultural Depictions of Multiple Sclerosis in Kuwait
Literary disability studies focuses on reading the representation of disability in literary and cultural texts. While there has been a plethora of Western scholarship around anglophone literature and readings of disability discourse, there remains little scholarship concerning Arab disability and narratives that examine disability. The silence around disability is staggering and part of the larger metanarrative of disability as taboo. The article…
Kuwaiti Women Writers and Anglophone Choices
While there has been a plethora of work on Arab women writers, little attention has been paid to Kuwaiti women writers, especially those who write Anglophone literature. This research paper argues that the choice to write in English rather than Arabic leaves these writers in a problematic position. As a result of embracing the English language, rather than their mother tongue, they are left outside of the dominant literary circle and often margin…
Disability as metaphor or resilience
People’s attitudes toward illness and disability are a product of how they are informed culturally. Most studies on disability offer quantitative views and apply Western disability models. In this paper, through a series of invoked conversations (morphed into poems) with my Palestinian maternal grandmother and my mother, I examine the concepts of resilience, survival, and historical trauma. By using autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I consider …
Life Writing by Kuwaiti Women
Life narratives are rare in the Gulf region due to many issues. Kuwait women’s writing about their lives, bodies, illnesses, and disabilities is almost unheard of. This article considers two texts by contemporary Kuwaiti women and situates their illness narratives within Kuwait’s social context. By writing about their illness and disability, the authors re-claim their voice and agency, writing their silenced bodies as Helene Cixous urges women to…
Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”
This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own h…
A Critical Content Analysis of Kuwaiti TV Shows and Plays on Disability Representations
There is a dearth of disability literature in the Arab world, especially studies related to the cultural representation of disabled people in the media. This article provides a historical overview of television and theatre in Kuwait, an exploration of different disability perspectives such as the individual and the social models of disability, as well as cultural approaches to disability. This article also critically explores and analyzes the con…
Serial Readers United
Through an exploration of Kuwait’s independent bookstores, the article challenges the reputation of Gulf Arab monarchies as generally lacking a reading culture. It treats independent bookstores as urban spaces designed to enable participation in the practices and rituals of reading books and as indicators of reading microcultures in the country. Run by readers and writers, independent bookstores fill a gap in the cultural landscape in order to cu…
Female Representation in the Golden Age of Kuwaiti Television
This paper addresses the representation of female rebellion and madness in the Kuwaiti musalsal ʿIla al-dunya al-salam which was produced in 1987. The show revolves around two sisters, Mahthootha and Mabrooka, adult women who are residents of a mental institution. The law dictates that their uncle is their guardian and has complete control of their finances. He devises a plan to strip them of their rights and their inheritance by committing them …
Narrative Reflections on Losing a Companion Animal
This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribut…
Writing the Silenced Body
There is a daunting scarcity of illness narratives and even fewer fictional texts that include a disabled female heroine in Arab literary works. Disability features in various texts as a subtheme, part of the narrative but never the narrative itself. As a scholar of literature with some research experience in the field of disability studies, I have always struggled to find such works, including memoirs, that feature disabled protagonists. I was d…
Writing an Illness Narrative and Negotiating Identity
This essay begins by discussing illness narratives in literature. Given the lack of illness narratives in Arabic literature and Anglophone literature, the author has written a collection of short stories, which are partly a memoir dealing with her own disability. The work is entitled Notes on the Flesh. It deals with illness and disability in Kuwait and the Middle East in general. Using critical theory such as Arthur Frank’s work on storytelling …
Troubling Academe
There is a crude distinction between activism and academe, between academe and creative writing, and between academic and disabled academic. I am an Arab woman, a disabled academic, a creative writer who has found embodied activism in academe. To work from within and without the body is to find alternative ways of navigation. To consider the shamed body is to unveil the social constructions of ableism. Writing and teaching, then, become tools of …
Disability as metaphor or resilience
People’s attitudes toward illness and disability are a product of how they are informed culturally. Most studies on disability offer quantitative views and apply Western disability models. In this paper, through a series of invoked conversations (morphed into poems) with my Palestinian maternal grandmother and my mother, I examine the concepts of resilience, survival, and historical trauma. By using autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I consider …
Narrative Reflections on Losing a Companion Animal
This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribut…
Madwomen Agents
Women have long used the literary theme of women’s madness as a form of protest within patriarchal cultures. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the dissertation places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India), or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jean Rhys’s …
Comment from the Field
What does it mean to be disabled in a society that is always pushing for normalcy? There has been little, if any, scholarly attention focusing on perceptions and understandings of disability. Global disability research is still often neglected. We now have statistical data, but hardly any personal, real, and lived experiences of women with disabilities. These voices are hardly ever heard. Academia boasts the flourishing field of disability studie…
Madwomen Agents
Women have long used the literary theme of women’s madness as a form of protest within patriarchal cultures. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the dissertation places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India), or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jean Rhys’s …
Troubling Academe
There is a crude distinction between activism and academe, between academe and creative writing, and between academic and disabled academic. I am an Arab woman, a disabled academic, a creative writer who has found embodied activism in academe. To work from within and without the body is to find alternative ways of navigation. To consider the shamed body is to unveil the social constructions of ableism. Writing and teaching, then, become tools of …
Writing an Illness Narrative and Negotiating Identity
This essay begins by discussing illness narratives in literature. Given the lack of illness narratives in Arabic literature and Anglophone literature, the author has written a collection of short stories, which are partly a memoir dealing with her own disability. The work is entitled Notes on the Flesh. It deals with illness and disability in Kuwait and the Middle East in general. Using critical theory such as Arthur Frank’s work on storytelling …
Narrative Reflections on Losing a Companion Animal
This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribut…
Writing the Silenced Body
There is a daunting scarcity of illness narratives and even fewer fictional texts that include a disabled female heroine in Arab literary works. Disability features in various texts as a subtheme, part of the narrative but never the narrative itself. As a scholar of literature with some research experience in the field of disability studies, I have always struggled to find such works, including memoirs, that feature disabled protagonists. I was d…
Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”
This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own h…
A Critical Content Analysis of Kuwaiti TV Shows and Plays on Disability Representations
There is a dearth of disability literature in the Arab world, especially studies related to the cultural representation of disabled people in the media. This article provides a historical overview of television and theatre in Kuwait, an exploration of different disability perspectives such as the individual and the social models of disability, as well as cultural approaches to disability. This article also critically explores and analyzes the con…
Serial Readers United
Through an exploration of Kuwait’s independent bookstores, the article challenges the reputation of Gulf Arab monarchies as generally lacking a reading culture. It treats independent bookstores as urban spaces designed to enable participation in the practices and rituals of reading books and as indicators of reading microcultures in the country. Run by readers and writers, independent bookstores fill a gap in the cultural landscape in order to cu…
Female Representation in the Golden Age of Kuwaiti Television
This paper addresses the representation of female rebellion and madness in the Kuwaiti musalsal ʿIla al-dunya al-salam which was produced in 1987. The show revolves around two sisters, Mahthootha and Mabrooka, adult women who are residents of a mental institution. The law dictates that their uncle is their guardian and has complete control of their finances. He devises a plan to strip them of their rights and their inheritance by committing them …
Hip-Hop in the Arab World and Kuwait
It is no wonder that young generations in the globe as well as in the Arab World are attracted to hip hop music that absorbs a load of incompatible emotions in a world of many conflicts and contradictions. The American roots of hip hop culture attract the young generation in the Arab World. This article examines examples from Arab and Gulf hip hop culture. A successful and distinguished Kuwaiti hip hop duo, Sons of Yusuf, has been interviewed to …
Literary and Cultural Depictions of Multiple Sclerosis in Kuwait
Literary disability studies focuses on reading the representation of disability in literary and cultural texts. While there has been a plethora of Western scholarship around anglophone literature and readings of disability discourse, there remains little scholarship concerning Arab disability and narratives that examine disability. The silence around disability is staggering and part of the larger metanarrative of disability as taboo. The article…
Kuwaiti Women Writers and Anglophone Choices
While there has been a plethora of work on Arab women writers, little attention has been paid to Kuwaiti women writers, especially those who write Anglophone literature. This research paper argues that the choice to write in English rather than Arabic leaves these writers in a problematic position. As a result of embracing the English language, rather than their mother tongue, they are left outside of the dominant literary circle and often margin…
Disability as metaphor or resilience
People’s attitudes toward illness and disability are a product of how they are informed culturally. Most studies on disability offer quantitative views and apply Western disability models. In this paper, through a series of invoked conversations (morphed into poems) with my Palestinian maternal grandmother and my mother, I examine the concepts of resilience, survival, and historical trauma. By using autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I consider …
Life Writing by Kuwaiti Women
Life narratives are rare in the Gulf region due to many issues. Kuwait women’s writing about their lives, bodies, illnesses, and disabilities is almost unheard of. This article considers two texts by contemporary Kuwaiti women and situates their illness narratives within Kuwait’s social context. By writing about their illness and disability, the authors re-claim their voice and agency, writing their silenced bodies as Helene Cixous urges women to…
Illness and Disability
Illness and Disability Shahd Alshammari (bio) Herewith a list of recent books about illness and disability and the transformative changes that happen to us during these journeys with the body. Some of these works are fictional, and others are memoirs. AZIZ MOHAMMED The Critical Case of a Man Called K Trans. Humphrey Davies Hoopoe Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this work is now translated into English and charts a youn…
Gulf Women’s Lives
Gulf Women’s Lives
This edited volume investigates how Gulf women negotiate spaces of dissent through their writing. The focus on women’s narratives offers critical perspectives on how women in the Gulf construct themselves as gendered selves and authors, how they exist within public and private spaces, and how voice and agency are part of their conversations in various spheres. In the process, the book engages readers in theoretical reflections and conversations w…
Gulf Women's Lives
From Stigma to Speech
Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa (review)
Writing and righting disability representation
Limited literature is available from Arab women authors on the topic of disability, and even less interest is found when looking at the publishing industry. This autoethnographic paper examines the role of the publishing industry in promoting underrepresented voices and questions who determines which voices are important and deserving of publication. This article intends to highlight the obstacles that disabled scholars and individuals confront i…
Stigmatizing Views of Ill Women in Kuwaiti Memoir of Arthritis
This study explored the portrayal of illness and disability in Kuwaiti author Kulthoum Dashti’s memoir Almost Faded: Rheumatoid Arthritis Journey specifically focusing on how health-based thematic categorizations intersect with perceptions of the external world. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-2015) software program, a corpus specific to the novel was analyzed, retrieving thematic categories and contrasting them with the psychol…
Writing Disability and Breaking Language
Safe Corridor by Jan Dost (review)
Sociology (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Literature (13 works) · Art (12 works) · History (12 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Disability Rights and Representation (8 works) · Socioeconomic Development in MENA (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)