women-academics-from-tunisia

"Be aware of the importance of culture; be open-minded as a scientist and as a person. Seek independence. Understand how important it is to be a responsible citizen. Be of good heart and be confident."

"Spectroscopy is about analyzing bodies according to the spectrum of light emitted or absorbed by matter. What does that mean? Think of the planets, stars, galaxies, which are beyond our reach. – How is it that man is able to get information about them and photograph them"

"I am grateful for what science has already brought to people's lives. My mother had open-heart surgery, and her life was saved. There are no borders in science, people are equal: scientists are not separated by color, gender, religion, or money"

"In future, nothing should be impossible. I long to build a center for optics and photonics for African research scientists in Tunisia, just like the Trieste center. But I also have wilder dreams – of using science to control the climate, to create rain, make deserts fertile, and to get drinking water cheaply from sea water."

"Light is a set of waves through space. So the “messages” are presented as waves. Each atom has its own way to send its message. This is its “spectra”, its own set of waves. So spectroscopy is the common language of atoms. When you know how to read these waves, you understand the language of atoms and molecules."

"It is from the history of science that I was led to deepen my knowledge of religions, particularly Islam. I was not a priori versed in theological questions. What interests me is our relationship to modernity and the question of secularization. I immersed myself in the writings of modern thinkers from Islamic countries, who look at Islam from a scientific perspective without any essentialism."

"Today, I would love that everyone could freely use their conscience, benefit from knowledge that is universal, and not “Western” as it is sometimes called. I hope to encourage readers to revisit the history of science in the lands of Islam and to discover critical thinking."

"They drew lessons from the decline of science in the Arab world and sought a middle way to reconcile attachment to religion with modernity."

"I work for the autonomy of science, to free it from ideological discourses that are a source of blockage. If science has progressed in the West, it is by detaching itself from the religious sphere. The Muslim nations that have fallen so far behind need to take a leap forward."

"Inheritance legislation is therefore contrary to the principle of equality and represents a fundamental issue for the defence of women's rights. This is obviously not the only source of inequality."

"I opted to specialize in medical genetics, a decision that caused much confusion within the medical fraternity."

"I fulfilled a childhood dream of understanding how life started and how all human beings are eternal."

"To many of them, the study of medical genetics sounded like a luxury, and the idea of a medical doctor conducting research was far too radical."

"I then look into the technical problems of the diagnostic laboratory in consultation with my medical and technical biologist colleagues."

"In the afternoon, when I have a lesson to teach, I do it, otherwise I am in the research laboratory at the medical school, which is 300 meters from the hospital department. In this laboratory, I carry out most of my research activity and monitor the work of the students I supervise."

"I have other activities that I may be called upon to undertake, such as participation in the work of commissions or juries. And of course I regularly participate in scientific meetings both nationally and internationally."

"To the entire Futura-Sciences team Futura-Sciences is a portal that I already knew well before it dedicated a section to me on the occasion of the UNESCO-L'OREAL prize."

"Type Sciences or ethics or disease or human in the Google search engine for example and you are sure to have a complete scientific file, well documented and even a discussion forum."

"At a time when websites are flourishing so strongly, we need serious, effective portals to really be a scientific reference for young people and even professionals. Futura-Sciences is one in my opinion."

"It is an honour especially since in this category, I actually represent Africa. To this date, I remain the only member from the African continent to bear this title."

"Is to succeed my master and founder of the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, the late Professor Amor Chadli."

"I saw mothers that had two or three children with a serious and incurable genetic pathology. Such encounters made a strong impression on me and underscored the need for better care for genetic disorders."

"The Arab world doesn’t want to know it, and this comes out clearly today, when we see what’s happening in Libya with the return of the slave trade. This is the dark part of Arab history. Africans know it and remember it perfectly well."

"Total technology is the idea that technology carries a political and ideological project through its will to power and limitless control. It’s impossible to grasp the ramifications of this from one single angle"

"This binary choice is self-manipulation! For years, we’ve been formulating the problem in exactly the same way on matters of technological surveillance"

"If France wanted to use francophonie to impose anything on me, an ideology or a way of life or whatever, the French language that I have learned and that I use would allow me to fight against such arrogance."

"Both Musk and Sam Altman have a rare relationship with risk: they’re always taking gambles’"

"The difference is that all of a sudden, since it’s private, cost is reduced and a horizon of profitability appears. And privatisation means that what is therapeutic or for leisure today can become a weapon of war tomorrow"

"It’s too easy to treat these people like eccentrics. When we can’t take something seriously, it tends to swallow us up! Elon Musk is nothing of a clown, no matter what some people say: through the highly strategic companies he manages, he de facto occupies a geopolitical position. We have to accept the reality"

"The France of fraternity, equality, liberty belongs to me as much as to you'"

"For me, it is an instrument to fight against any form of hegemony, whether political or cultural, and whether it comes from France, America or Russia."

"Our society has failed in its desire to rebuild its freedom, democracy and dignity. The social link between Tunisians themselves has deteriorated."

"It's upsetting when I see these young people who can speak neither Arabic nor French, and who can't read. How can you be a citizen of a free country when you don't have access to culture?"

"How can we trust each other when we no longer trust ourselves, when we have lost our self-esteem? When we will finally make progress on the path of self-realization, this feeling of rejecting France – and others in general – will automatically recede."

"My point is rather that we have to deal with a very complex configuration in which local interpretations of decoloniality should match our understanding of ourselves."

"This is not to say that all the difficulties one can face in this task are related to this specific anchorage as if it were something preventing us from adopting this particular scheme"

"This means that decoloniality has not to be adopted and applied only because it IS decoloniality, but instead it has to be carefully read, subverted, and if needed, dismissed."

"I am particularly motivated to promote the work of Tunisian and North African contemporary artists who live in their countries, and don’t have enough international visibility."

"In an Arabo-Islamic country, it is important that artists remind and highlight the importance of the body in the private, social, and cultural life."

"This recent spectacular growth on the number of art students has certainly boosted the interest for art-related events but not necessarily produced more quality artists on the national and international scene yet"

"That is why today, an intercultural event around the concept of the limits and excesses of the body can give food for thought on our present."

"In this paper, we theoretically and empirically analyze the impact of competition on poverty. We consider a general equilibrium framework with vertical preferences and compare poverty in a Monopoly setting versus a Duopoly setting considering explicitly the ownership structure"

"Poverty is measured by the size of the population living below an absolute poverty line. Theoretical results show that the impact of competition on poverty is contingent to the ownership structure, the poverty line and the relative dispersion of the individuals with respect to their intensity of preference for quality and sensitivity to effort:"

"competition can improve or worsen poverty depending on the model's parameters. Empirical findings for the three existing poverty lines (1.9, 3.2, and $5.5) are consistent to a large extent with our theoretical results."

"In committing politically, taking up important roles, and expressing their views, these militants were hardly representative of colonial Tunisia’s mostly illiterate and poor Muslim population. But they did break out of the positions generally attributed to women."

"These women’s commitment would nonetheless shape their lives in an enduring way — and leave a mark on Tunisia’s own history. As inspiring figures who had fought for women’s autonomy, they helped prepare the ground for the blooming of Tunisian feminism in the 1980s"

"As I see it, the universal is besieged by the hegemony of the commodity and that of the religious. Two faces of globalisation that have nothing to do with the universal, that is anti-universal, which is a thesis I worked on in my book La Double Impasse, in which there are extensive sections on the culturalist and the essentialist."

"How do I introduce myself? Every work, academic or research-based, rests one way or another on a personal make-up. If I wasn’t who I am, or I didn’t receive the make-up that I did, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote.”"

"I believe that in Tunisia, and perhaps in all the Arab countries, the communist parties — for all their many mistakes and shortcomings — were the only place in which ethno-religious affiliations were overcome, which is an element that can’t be overlooked in my personal make-up. My childhood was not at all marked by that kind of segregation."

"Then history took its course, and the lives and fates of individuals were tied to the collective history, as is always the case in our countries, and the Jewish minority left the country, for numerous reasons."