I have spent, in total, perhaps four months in Tunisia. It has left a deeper mark than places I’ve lived for years.
Arriving
I came to Tunis in the autumn of 2022 through the School for International Training’s programme on Politics and Religious Integration in the Mediterranean — a semester split between Tunisia and three weeks in Sicily studying migration flows. I was twenty-one, halfway through my degree at Occidental, and I had spent the previous two years studying religion, nationalism, and political identity in seminar rooms. Tunisia was the first place where those subjects stopped being analytical categories and became the texture of daily life.
The programme was academically rigorous, but what made it transformative was everything that happened around the formal curriculum. Walking through the medina, navigating conversations in a mixture of French and the Tunsi dialect I was beginning to pick up, sitting in cafés in La Marsa watching the light on the water — these weren’t breaks from the learning. They were part of it. Understanding how political Islam reshaped women’s lived experience after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution required more than reading about it. It required being in the places where it happened, listening to the people it happened to, and doing so in their languages and on their terms.
The Research
My independent research in Tunis — supervised by Dr. Raja Boussedra — focused on how women in the suburbs of Tunis experienced the impact of Political Islam and Salafism on their rights in the years following the Jasmine Revolution. I collected responses in English and French, conducting interviews that required not just linguistic facility but genuine sensitivity to the fact that I was asking women to speak about deeply personal experiences of political and religious change with a foreign researcher.
That fieldwork shaped everything that came after. My MPhil dissertation on gendered rhetoric in right-wing movements across the US and UK was, in many ways, an extension of what I first encountered in Tunis — the realisation that the relationship between gender, religion, and political power is not a niche academic interest but a structural feature of how exclusionary movements operate everywhere. Tunisia is where that understanding moved from theoretical to felt.
The research also taught me something about methodology that I carry into all my work now: the gap between what frameworks describe and what people actually experience. The women I spoke with in the suburbs of Tunis were living inside political and religious dynamics that international observers described in one set of terms and that they themselves described in quite another. Learning to hold both of those descriptions simultaneously — to take the institutional analysis seriously without letting it overwrite the lived reality — is a skill I first developed there.
Coming Back
After finishing my master’s at Trinity College Dublin, I spent several weeks interrailing through Europe before heading back to Seattle. At the end of that trip, I didn’t go straight home. I went back to Tunis.
It wasn’t a research visit and it wasn’t planned far in advance. I just wanted to be there again. I wanted to walk through the medina, sit in La Marsa, hear the call to prayer over the rooftops, and spend time in a place that had reshaped how I think about the world. The fact that I was drawn back — that Tunisia pulled me in even when there was no institutional reason to return — says something about what the place means to me that’s harder to articulate in academic language.
There’s a particular quality to Tunis that I haven’t found anywhere else. The warmth and openness of the people, the way the city holds layers of history without making a museum of itself, the architecture that moves between Ottoman, French colonial, and modern in the space of a single street. And then there’s Carthage — sitting quietly on the coast, one of the most consequential cities in human history, while most people who’ve heard the name couldn’t point to it on a map, let alone connect it to the modern city that grew up beside it. That gap between what a place is and what the world knows about it resonates with me. A lot of my research is about exactly that kind of gap — the distance between reality and the narratives constructed around it.
What I Carry
Tunisia is present in my daily life in ways that might not be obvious from my CV. I wear jasmine oil — the scent of the medina. I wear a Hand of Fatima around my neck. I use French regularly and have absorbed phrases from the Tunsi dialect that surface without my thinking about them. These aren’t affectations or souvenirs; they’re traces of a place that became part of how I move through the world.
I think what draws me to Tunisia so strongly, despite having spent relatively little time there compared to the other places I’ve called home, is that it’s the place where the things I care about most intellectually first became real to me. Australia is where my curiosity began. Seattle is where I grew up. Los Angeles and Dublin are where I was educated. But Tunis is where I first stood inside the questions I study — where gender, religion, political power, and the gap between institutional frameworks and human experience stopped being subjects and became something I could see and hear and sit with.
That matters more than the number of months I spent there.