This sixth conference in the series will deal with the main debates that have taken place in Morocco in relation with the feminist movement from 1992 to the present day. It includes a series of debates which led to significant socio-political change and spurred developments in the women’s movement, marking its path and identity as a form of collective action, as well as determining the way in which its reference points and dynamics evolved as a women’s rights movement. 

The first debate arose in 1992 after the “million signatures campaign,” which was launched to call for the repeal of the Mudawana (family code), leading to the first reformation of the Personal Status Code in 1993. The second debate, which occurred in the late 1990s, after a controversy over the National Action Plan for the Integration of Women in Development, led to the announcement of a new Family Code in 2004. Later, after social mobilizations in 2011, other debates arose with bolder approaches in terms of the topics of inheritance, abortion, individual freedoms, etc. Today at last, the current amendment of the Family Code is being carried out 20 years later. At the same time as these these debates, women’s political participation has similarly formed a major part of the movement’s activities.

A researching professor at the Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, Rajae El Khamsi earned her bachelor’s degree in Spanish Language and Literature from that same university (1999) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Valencia (2013). She completed training in the program “Women and Development” at the University of Valencia’s University Institute of Women’s Studies (2001) and later doctoral studies at the same institute, all of which culminated in her doctoral thesis titled: “Identity and Gender: Approaching the feminist discourse in Morocco,” which received the Presen Sáenz de Descatllar Award in 2014. 

Since 2019, she has been teaching as an external lecturer in the Master’s degree program in Gender and Equality Policies at the University of Valencia. From 2018 to 2022, she also taught classes forming part of the GEMIDE (Gender, Migrations and Human Rights) Diploma program at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a member of research projects like the one at the University of Granada titled “Legislative Changes in the Central Maghreb Region After the Arab Spring: Democratizing narratives, public freedoms and gender” (PID2022-139657NB-I00). 

She has participated in various international gatherings in Morocco, Spain, Portugal and Mexico and has had several articles published on gender, migration and feminism (ORCID).