Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah is a Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas cover Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror, youth identites and social movement activism. Dr Abdel-Fattah is also one of Australia’s most prominent Palestine advocates, a former litigation lawyer, and the multi-award-winning author of 12 books published in over 20 countries and translated into over 15 languages. She is a lawyer of the NSW Supreme Court and patron of the Racial Justice Centre, the first Australian Community Legal Service focussed on racial justice.

Randa’s current Future Fellowship project, “Arab/Muslim Australian Social Movements since the 1970s: a hidden history” traces Arab and Muslim intersectional, decolonial, transnational, solidarity activism as a constitutive dimension of Australian political culture and social movement participation. Randa is producing a digital archive and exhibition tracing this history.

Randa is also a multi award-winning author. Her literary corpus of novels, short stories and a picture story book, primarily deal with Islamophobia, Palestine, racism, the war on terror, youth identities and refugees and social justice. She is well known for her commentary as a public intellectual, her media appearances and her essay and op-ed writing across a wide range of genres.

Randa’s academic books include Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism (Routledge 2017) and Coming of Age in the War on Terror (2021 NewSouth Publishing), which was long-listed for the Stella Prize 2022, shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2022 and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2022.

Randa is committed to translating her scholarship to both an academic audience and the wider public through scholarly and creative works. In light of her findings in her DECRA project “Trust, Politics, Fear: Generation 9/11 Muslim and non-Muslim Youth compared”, Randa created Australia’s first early-reader book series focused on diversity and anti-racism. The series is called ‘Our Stories’ and the 4 books in the series by diverse writers and illustrators, including Randa’s The Very Best Doughnut, were shortlisted for the 2024 DANZ Children’s Book Award (The Diversity in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand Children's Book Award).

Randa’s DECRA research also inspired another project aimed at young children with the goal of translating her insights on pedagogies of decolonial solidarity into Australia’s first Black-Palestinian picture-story book collaboration, 11 Words For Love (Hachette, 2023; Candlewick, USA, 2023). 11 Words For Love was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and listed as a Notable Book in the prestigious Children’s Book Council Awards.

Randa’s books have won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Best Young Adult Fiction novel, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award People’s Choice Award, the Middle East Outreach Council (MEOC) USA Young adult book of the year, the Golden Inkys Best Young Adult Novel Award,  the Australian Industry Book Award Best Australian Book for Young Adult Readers and the Kathleen Mitchell Award. Randa has been shortlisted as the Australian laureate for the 2017 and 2018 global Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest and richest children’s literature award.

• Islamophobia
• Critical race theory  
• Arab and Muslim social movements particuarly Palestine.
• Palestine/Israel.
• Race and ethnic relations (particularly the spatial, embodied and material aspects of racism and Islamophobia)
• ‘Everyday multiculturalism’
• Youth identities and cultures in the context of the war on terror and the geopolitics of fear.
• Sociology of everyday life

Units:

• SOC175: Australian Society
• SOC175: Australia and Global Societies: An Introduction to Sociology
• SOCI318 Living Diversity: Multiculturalism, Racism and Nation
• SOC175- Australia and Global Societies: An Introduction to Sociology