Features

A man walks out a men-only bar in downtown Tunis. Suddenly he looks extremely small. Next to him is an unusual sight in town, a mural encouraging women to be bold, fearless and self-loving. This feminist mural, the first of its kind in Tunis, features two women: one them...

People fight for social justice in many different ways. Some get involved in communities that are victims of injustice, others go into the street to join a demonstration. What may seem more unusual is fighting for social justice through performing arts, like Justice in Motion Company does. We interviewed...

On a late and cold Sunday evening in Tunis, it was too late to find a café that stays open long enough for two women to settle in for a long talk. When we met Tunisian street artist Sangoura, we went from one café to the next the streets...

And God made me woman, with long hair, eyes, nose and a woman’s mouth. With curves and folds and soft hollows and dug into me, and made me a workshop for human beings. God delicately wove my nerves, carefully balanced the number of my hormones, composed my blood and...

Boy, my body is not your home. You are a guest.   These powerful words fill the room of Bowery Poetry Slam on a cold New York Monday evening in February, words of toxic masculinity, female empowerment and the pain of abortion fill the air. How dare you tell...

As the people streamed into the Institut français in downtown Tunis to attend to the first queer film festival in Tunisia and the Maghreb their faces reflected everyone’s excitement and emotional turmoil. To have such an event take place in a country where homosexuality is still criminalized legally and...

This article was written by Virginia Vigliar and Magdalena Mach   When she was 18 years old, Wai Wai Nu, her mother, her sister and one of her brothers heard a loud bang on the door in the middle of the night. 15 security forces arrested them and took...

Bulldozers fed at one of Rio’s historical favelas decreed as an “an area of special social interest” while residents clung to their houses in protest and used creative forms of activism to resist the unwanted changes. The reason? Building a stadium for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Imagine instead of...

When science and logic are used to debunk misconceptions, stereotypes, and to promote tolerance and open-mindedness, you might end up changing someone’s perceptions. This was the goal of Baha Lajmi and Fahd Baaziz, two 16-year-old Tunisian high school students from Soussa, when they started a YouTube channel, Draw My...

I met Sana Jlassi and Chouaib Brik, the masterminds behind Art Solution, the pioneering Tunisian association for urban culture and art founded in 2011, in the creative base of the association in Tunis. This space for creative expression and innovation, the Tag Store, made for a great setting for...

“My marriage was arranged against my will. It took practically a few days to make it happen. A few weeks into the married life my husband started beating me…” This is the story of Nodira, a young Tajik woman who has suffered abuse from those who, supposedly, should be...

Ghiles El Kadi and I are sitting in a café in Finsbury Park, London, home to a sizeable Algerian community, on a day where he has no lectures for his Economics Master’s at Westminster University. “Sometimes I come here to talk about football over a merguez sandwich.” Ghiles is...

There are many companies and researchers who have been working on stoves and other inventions that will allow people to have easy access to alternative cooking methods. Over half of the world still relies on open-flame cooking, which endangers people who inhale harsh smoke and are subject to fire...

In the pram, a toddler snoozes in the afternoon sunshine. She is dressed in a flashy pink tutu, a tiny little leather jacket, and it is all styled off by a set of golden necklaces. The mom proudly says she bought it all on the high-end mall on the...

Aatik is a project which was co-founded in Tunisia by Canadian Emma Djilali and her colleague Sophie Bergman from Germany in fall 2015. The project works with a group of female weavers in the region of Siliana in North-west Tunisia. The goal is to help these women to build up...