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When Raymi Khalifeh-Hamdan was 5 years old, she and her family hurriedly left southern Lebanon, avoiding the bombs of the war that had just broken out in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah. Images of the conflict haunted her childhood dreams.
We are all products of our environment, but for Khalifa-Hamdan, who graduated with honors from the University of Oregon this spring, this powerful early life experience has played a huge role in driving her academic and professional path thus far.
Khalifeh-Hamdan said she was fascinated by war and peace from a young age. She even named the kitten she got at age 6 after Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General. As she got older, returning to her family’s country every year, Khalifa-Hamdan says she felt a deep need to help and listen to others displaced by conflict around the world. And she wanted to gain a meaningful understanding of both religious coexistence and extremism in her native Lebanon and elsewhere.
“My deepest mission in life is to try to build peace in conflict-ridden regions like the one I come from,” she said.
After a stellar academic career at the UO’s Clarks Honors College, Khalife-Hamdan was selected for the prestigious Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Scholarship. this fall, making her one of five scholarship recipients selected from more than 700 applicants. Throughout the 2022-23 academic year, she worked at Victory Without War, a prominent foreign policy advocacy coalition in Washington, DC
This fall, Khalife-Hamdan was also selected as a finalist for the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, as well as a semi-finalist for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship, for possible postgraduate study in the UK or Ireland.
Advancing so far for all three awards is a rare feat, said Kevin Hatfield, assistant vice chancellor for undergraduate research and distinguished scholarship.
“In addition to the rigor of her research and scholarship, Raimi brings humanity to her academic training,” said Hatfield, whose student success team assisted Khalif-Hamdan with the scholarship application and interview processes.
“Her work often testifies to pain, trauma and endurance in the interest of elevating the voices of the communities she engages with,” he said.
After graduating from Oregon Episcopal School in Portland in 2018, Khalif-Hamdan comes to the UO on a Presidential Scholarship. A double major in Global Studies and Romance Languages, she quickly impressed her UO professors with the depth and thoroughness of her class work.
“She was remarkably engaged and the work she did went beyond the course requirements,” said UO English professor Steve Shankman.
Shankman said he and Khalif-Hamdan reviewed in class the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who writes extensively about man’s responsibility to the “other” and the power of face-to-face encounters as the starting point of human ethical obligation to one another.
“She really wrestled with the central question of Levinas’s work in a significant way,” Shankman said.
Khalif-Hamdan, meanwhile, credits her introduction to Levinas for “changing the way I see life,” and it helped inspire her 330-page thesis project: an ethnographic study of interreligious coexistence and religious extremism among young adults in Lebanon .
In sweltering heat, Khalif-Hamdan conducted 33 face-to-face interviews in both Muslim and Christian villages for the project as the country grappled with political crises and shortages of fuel, food and electricity.
“The stories I heard helped reveal some of the hidden drivers of terrorism,” she said. “At the same time, the majority of young adults I spoke to want to rethink identity and religion in Lebanon and break away from old sectarian narratives and structures.”
UO global studies professor Stephen Wooten advised Khalif-Hamdan on the project, often battling poor internet as they tried to connect while she was working from Lebanon. He described the final product as “well-crafted and insightful” and said her thesis review committee agreed the scholarship was “in the elite class even for a thesis (level).”
“She was determined to present (the interviewees’) stories with honesty, compassion and tenderness, and to make sure their life stories and perspectives were heard and appreciated,” Wooten added. “It’s a sign of Raimi’s personal character and nature.”
While at the UO, Khalife-Hamdan also shined outside the classroom. She was selected to attend the Oxford Human Rights Consortium as a first-year student and again as a senior, she presented five times at the UO Undergraduate Research Symposium and became an assistant to Shankman in his work as the UNESCO Chair of Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue and peace.
Using the four languages she speaks—Arabic, English, French, and Spanish—Khalif-Hamdan interned as a translator and interpreter for an immigration law firm and an immigrant and refugee support organization in Portland. She volunteered for the Lane County Refugee Resettlement Coalition and the Melissa Network, an organization for migrant and refugee women in Greece, in the summer of 2022. And she worked as an archivist for Their Story is Our Story, an organization that collects and shares first-hand accounts from refugees around the world.
“I breathe in the fires of anger that torment this world, and I call upon oceans to extinguish them,” wrote Khalifeh-Hamdan in the award-winning poem “Mujer de la tierra,” or Earth Woman, earlier this year. “I am a student of the Earth: I observe it, touch it, taste it.”
Although the global pandemic has made her time as a UO student “weird,” Khalif-Hamdan said that mostly distance learning has allowed her to do more creative face-to-face research and volunteer in different places.
“So many people have helped me along the way at UO,” she said. “I am very grateful for their support, which has helped me improve my research and academic work.”
Khalife-Hamdan said working in Washington on Win Without War as a Scoville Scholar this year was “extremely humbling.”
“The fact that the research I’m doing could end up being read by an office in the US Congress, that’s mind-blowing,” she said, recalling working on long papers that “would only be read by my favorite professors.”
But Khalif-Hamdan said she misses the field work and talking to real people affected by U.S. foreign policy decisions.
“We need to be on the ground. You understand a lot more about real-life impacts when you actually talk to people who have experienced those impacts,” she said. “And unfortunately their voices are still so ignored.”
—By Sol Hubbard, Undergraduate Education and Student Success
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