Join us for a discussion with Tanya Habjouqa, Ameera Harouda, Gideon Levy, and Gilles Paris, moderated by David Remnick on War Reporting and the Case of Gaza & Israel.
Join us for an eye-opening conference on “Visions of the World Beyond the West”
Join us for an exciting two-day workshop that will take as its objective a global history of translation and language in both the dissemination and reception of Ibn al-'Arabi's writings through discourse, music, and art.
This conference recentres the imperialist question as the principal contradiction to analyses of the 21st century political dynamics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It aims to analyze the emerging socio-political formations in the South of the world, and diagnose the status of US-led imperialism globally.
This workshop introduces a project co-sponsored by the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, the Political Science Department of the American University of Cairo, the Rabat Social Studies Institute, and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, examining the ethical implications of various approaches to research in the region. Among the issues that will be examined in the project are the role of uncredited research assistants, enumerators, “fixers” and other local aides; the use of intentionally ambiguous or misleading project descriptions or experimental conditions; the deployment of for-profit research firms; and the obligations researchers have to research subjects and communities under duress. The intent of the workshop is to introduce the project to the MESA membership at large and invite expressions of interest, particularly by social scientists, in the one or more of the workstreams being developed around these issues.
Given the timing of this Annual Meeting, this workshop will devote special attention to challenges of conducting ethical research under the extraordinary restrictions on local and international travel, social interaction and personal mobility imposed by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Chair: Lisa Anderson, Columbia University
Rabab el-Mahdi, American University in Cairo
Sari Hanafi, American University of Beirut
Seteney Shami, Arab Council for the Social Sciences
Saloua Zerhouni, Mohammed V University
Discussants: Sarah Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University and Maria Eriksson Baaz, Uppsala University
This two-day conference brings together a diverse group of established and emerging scholars working on the history of modern Iraq from the Ottoman period to the present to interrogate Iraqi studies; taking stock of its past, reflecting on the present, and looking towards its future.
The Cultural Turn in Arabic Literary Production
April 19-21
A conference in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Journal of Arabic Literature. Full program details to follow.
Organized by Muhsin al-Musawi (Columbia), Elizabeth Holt (Bard), Tarek El-Ariss (Dartmouth College), Nizar F. Hermes (University of Virginia) and Anna Ziajka-Stanton (Penn State University).
Sponsored by the Middle East Institute; the Department of Middle Eastern; South Asian, and African Studies; Society of Fellows, Heyman Center; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Center for Chinese Literature and Culture; University Seminars; Division of Humanities in the Arts and Sciences; Dartmouth College; Brill Academic Publishers; Dr. Aziz Shaibani/Arab-American Educational Foundation, Executive Vice President and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.
Turkey Today, the 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference
Organized by Columbia PhD students in collaboration with the Northeast Working Group on Turkish Studies
9AM-10.45AM | Panel I: Gender and Generation
Discussant: Ceren Belge (Associate Professor of Political Science, Concordia University)
The Limits and Extent of Gender Reforms in the MENA: Experimental Evidence from Tunisia and Turkey | Tahir Kilavuz (University of Notre Dame) and Youssef Chouhoud (Christopher Newport University)
Gendered Influences of Labor Market Policies in Turkey – Elifcan Celebi (University of Cologne)
Millenials and Populism: Generational Dimension of Democratic Backsliding – Burcu Kolcak (Rutgers University) and Sevinc Ozturk (Rutgers University)
11:15AM-1PM | Panel II: Partisan Politics and Voting Behavior
Discussant: Lisel Hintz (Assistant Professor of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies)
Expressive Partisanship in Turkey: Understanding the Content and Determinants of Partisan Identities | Melis Laebens (Yale University) and Aykut Ozturk (Syracuse University)
Informational Role of the Welfare State: Proximity to Healthcare and Votes | Serkant Adiguzel (Duke University), Asli Cansunar (University of Oxford), and Gozde Corekcioglu Ishakoglu (European University Institute)
Politics of Nostalgia and Populism: An Experimental Study | Ezgi Elci (Koc University)
2:15PM-4:15PM | Panel III: Democratic Backsliding
Discussant: Jack Snyder (Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Columbia University)
Who Wants a Coup? A List Experiment of Turkey’s 2016 Coup Attempt | Sharan Grewal (Brookings Institution)
Democratic Backsliding in Hybrid Regimes over Time: Internal and External Factors Effect in Turkey and Montenegro Case | Can Zengin (Temple University)
Price of Liberal Democracy: The Role of Public Services in Democratic Backsliding | Serkant Adiguzel (Duke University)
Leaders, Media, and Regimes: The Logic of Media in Illiberal Regimes | Elizabeth Pertner (The George Washington University)
4:30PM-5:45PM | Keynote Address
Lisel Hintz (Assistant Professor of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies)
Sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies and The Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
A space for inclusive, vibrant, and essential conversation about people on the move around the world. Featuring representatives from grassroots organizations across New York, UN agencies, media, culture, and academia.
Opening remarks by Ravi Ragbir, Immigrant Rights Activist and Executive Director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York.
Reception and Concert by Faraj Abyad and his Classical Arabic Music Ensemble to follow.
For more information, contact sipa.migration@columbia.edu.
The MEI co-sponsors an all-day symposium organized by the Center for the Study of Social Difference.
How can we imagine justice, practice solidarity and create change across barriers of social difference in today’s political landscape? As the acceptance of inequality has become the new norm to a degree we might have deemed unthinkable, and as public dialogue has reached an impasse, protest and resistance continue. This conference brings together scholars, artists, and activists from around the globe whose work can inspire new ways of thinking, seeing and listening, and productive strategies of intervention for our time.
Registration will be open HERE starting September 5th. .
This day-long event is the third of a three-piece series that focuses on the movement of people across and along the Mediterranean and the emergence, re-signification, and use of sites of memory. It is organized by Seth Kimmel and Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Bringing together a mix of panelists from the humanities and social sciences, the day will include work by the following scholars: Avi Astor (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Nina Zhiri (UC San Diego), Isolina Ballesteros (CUNY), Eric Calderwood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Charles Hirschkind (UC Berkeley).
Please note that this event has required registration. Please visit the Eventbrite page here to register, and to look at the full schedule: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sites-of-religious-memory-in-an-age-of-exodus-western-mediterranean-tickets-44486264615
This day-long event is the second of a three-piece series that focuses on the movement of people across and along the Mediterranean and the emergence, re-signification, and use of sites of memory.
This day-long event is the first of a three-piece series that focuses on the movement of people across and along the Mediterranean and the emergence, re-signification, and use of sites of memory. Bringing together a mix of panelists from the humanities and social sciences, the day will include work by the following scholars. Emrah Yildiz (Northwestern University) will present his work on “The Ways of Zainab: Ziyarat & Maqam,Visitation and the Shrine, in the Syrian Age of Exodus.” Faiz Ahmed (Brown University) will discuss “Indo-Afghans and Religious Memory in the Ottoman Mediterranean: Jaffa to Jerusalem, Tripoli to Istanbul.” Columbia’s Dimitrios Antoniouwill talk about “Memories of a Spatial Imagination: The Athens Mosque and the Politics of Sacrifice.” And Adnan A. Husain (Queen’s University) will speak about “Miraculous Commemorations: The Easter Fire at the Holy Sepulchre in Medieval Jerusalem. ”
Respondents will include Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, and Avinoam Shalem.
This conference brings together scholars working broadly in Ottoman and Mughal pasts to converse, consult, and present what ways of thinking and doing difference are recoverable to us. This workshop will take as its objective a grounded history of difference narrated in diverse textual and visual cultures. We aim to incorporate venues beyond the legal—histories, hagiographies, travel accounts, visual and material culture—into the discussions of the contemporary.
Join the Middle East Institute as a co-sponsor for this one-day conference to identify and discuss key methodological questions in the use of visual documents in an interdisciplinary manner, drawing from new research in the field of Late Ottoman history.
HOW DO AUTHORS AND READERS INHABIT DIFFERENT DISCOURSES AND UNDERSTANDINGS OF ADAB? HOW IS TEXTUAL AUTHORITY IN ARABIC GENERATED THROUGH COMPETING DISCIPLINARY SENSES OF INTERPRETATION AND CITATION? HOW DOES THIS ALL RELATE TO LITERARY FORM? AND WHEN ISN’T IT ADAB ANYMORE?
This one-day conference will bring together artists, academics, activists, community leaders, lawyers, journalists, targets of surveillance, and those charged with conducting said surveillance.
Please join the Middle East Institute and leading Iranian intellectuals from around the country for a special two-day Persica Forum. This conference includes critical discussions of controversial topics centered on religious and secular thought among some leading Iranian intellectuals.
Join the Middle East Institute cosponsored two-day conference addressing important issues on African Languages, the agency, and the production of knowledge with Keynote Speakers Professor Ghirmai Negash (Ohio University) and Professor Fallou Ngom (Boston University)
Over the past two centuries, North Africa has been transformed by momentous economic and political change as well as mass migration. This one-day conference will address how these developments have shaped conceptions of population and territory and, in turn, personal and collective identities.
The symposium engages intersecting imaginaries and histories that impact Palestinians, Kashmiris, and Tamils. Complex modes of power and history structure conquest, appropriation, and occupation across shifting colonial, (post)colonial, and decolonial moments. Peoples and landscapes are witness to monumental partitions, erasures, and Nakbas (catastrophes), producing states of exception organized through securitization, majoritarianism, and militarism.
The symposium is concerned with issues of subjugation, minoritization, and racialization; and persistent efforts to articulate/silence truth and practice resistance, freedom, and self-determination. We draw on the efforts of native-local and allied intellectuals, activists, artists, and scholars of colonized peoples and geographies to decolonize knowledge and facilitate counter-memory.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
Times: 9am-12.30pm, 6-9pm
The Columbia Journalism School, in conjunction with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, and the Middle East Institute of Columbia University, is hosting a mini-conference on covering alternate narratives of the Middle East.
The event will highlight best practices and offer guidance on covering the region in ways that move beyond the recurring conflict motifs to reveal the diversity and complexity of world views and lived experiences of those in the region.
The conference will be comprised of two morning panel discussions (9am-12:30pm) with journalists and journalism educators and an evening event (6-9pm) with a panel discussion and concert with celebrated Lebanese indie band, Mashrou' Leila.
Speakers (confirmed so far) include: Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, Nina Ansary, Sheila Coronel, Nahed Eltantawy, Shahira Fahmy, Lonnie Isabel, Alia Malek, Souad Mekhennet.
Tickets for the Mashrou' Leila panel and discussion can be purchased here.
RSVP for the morning panels here.
The death of the Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar in February 2015 represents the loss of a major voice of world literature and one of the last great literary representatives of the age of decolonization. For half a century, Djebar explored her country’s past and present in novels, essays and films that combine poignant lyricism with theoretical sophistication. Counter-narratives to official nationalism, her works highlight, above all, the experiences of Algerian women before, during and after colonialism. In this one-day conference an international group of leading scholars reflects on Djebar’s poetics and politics and the legacies of her writing in Algeria, France and beyond.
The conference will include three panels: Overtures and Departures; Memory and Mourning; and History and Fantasy; and a keynote address by Gayatri Spivak.
This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
Time: See schedule here
As the rift between theory and application in the field of Iraqi studies has grown over the past three decades for political, social, economic and security reasons, the Conference seeks to create an informed space to address major intellectual and political issues pertinent to Iraq in a manner that bears practical utility. To that end, the Conference will bring together a number of scholars and researchers in the field of Iraqi studies as well as Iraqi policy makers, journalists and novelists, with the hope that this platform will help modify, extend, or reposition existing frameworks of knowledge to allow for new possibilities of application and action.
Conference Co-Organizers:
Muhsin al-Musawi, Columbia University
Yasmeen Hanoosh, Portland State
For more details click here.
Register by emailing Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich at jsj10@columbia.edu.
Sponsored by the Middle East Institute, the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department (MESAAS), Butler Library, and al-Shaybani Foundation.
This is a two-day conference to discuss the recent Tunisian transition to democracy and to examine how and why democracy succeeded there.
Columbia University Religion Department Graduate Student Conference
Pedagogy, transmission, and technology transform the teaching of religion by shaping the movement of ideas. Often understood as distinct categories, pedagogy, transmission, and technology substantially overlap in discussions of how, why, and by what means religion is taught. By bringing to light both how religions themselves are so often pedagogical in nature and the ways the study of religion poses particular pedagogical problems, this conference aims to challenge popular modes of teaching religion. In this conference we will discuss fundamental questions of how religion can be studied and taught, how religious knowledge can be created and transmitted, and how new technologies enable new ways of imagining religion. By putting into conversation teachers of religion from both within and outside religious communities, this conference seeks to not only cultivate interdisciplinary conversation, but also transgress the boundaries between religion and its secular study.
For more information click here.
Sponsored by the Sponsored by the Department of Religion, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, the Graduate Student Advisory Council, and the Middle East Institute.
What can the study of prayer tell us about social life, religious institutions and practices, ethical self-formation, and our concepts of communication, both shared and unique? The Social Science Research Council's Program on Religion and the Public Sphere announces Why Prayer?
A Conference on New Directions in the Study of Prayer, a two-day gathering that will showcase the work of over 30 scholars and journalists who have explored these questions and more.
Please join us February 6-7, 2015, for panels and presentations on topics including religious technologies, embodiment, material culture, language, politics, and the mind. Beginning Friday afternoon, the conference will also feature the Prayer Expo-a pop-up installation of multi-media presentations and material objects that call attention to the myriad representations of prayer shaping discourse and practice. On Saturday, two plenary events will highlight the multiple registers of engagement occasioned by new, transdisciplinary research on the practice of prayer.
Presented by the Social Science Research Council, Program on Religion and the Public Sphere, and the following Columbia University co-sponsors: the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL); the Middle East Institute; the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS); and the departments Anthropology and Psychology.
For conference programs and detailed information visit the Social Science Research Council, Program on Religion and the Public Sphere.
REGISTER NOW
North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS) presents the 43 RD Annual Conference The Concept of Authority in Muslim Societies: Political, Religious, Social and Literary
Registeration Required
Conference Program
Seventh Annual OASIES Graduate Student Conference.
The Harriman Institute and the Organization for the Advancement of Studies of Inner Eurasian Societies at Columbia University, Princeton University, and New York University are pleased to announce its 7th Annual OASIES Conference.
Inner Eurasia has been and continues to be particularly fertile terrain for thinking through ideas of connections, networks, and linkages across culture, space, and time. The very language of connecting and linking, however, can inadvertently simplify the complex and mutually constituting qualities of interactions at the point of impact. While the popular concept of globalization, for example, often highlights the entangled nature of politics, history and society, its theorizations also open up possibilities for more thorough investigation into the different elements of these entanglements. In other words, a productive engagement with connections and networks must be coupled with a re-interrogation of the basic units of analysis that might otherwise be too easily presupposed. Bearing this in mind, this year's conference asks: in what ways can rethinking connections, networks, and linkages not only reconfigure but re-conceptualize the categories that structure our scholarship on Inner Eurasia?
The conference considers Eurasia past and present, spanning from the Black Sea to Mongolia, from Siberia to South Asia. Stressing multi-disciplinarity, submissions are welcome from a variety of departments, programs, and centers, including but not limited to: Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Comparative Literature, Fine Arts, History, Political Science, Religion, Sociology, Caucasian Studies, Central Asian Studies, Inner Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, the Middle East Institute, Mongolian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literature, South Asian Studies, and Tibetan Studies.
For a full program, please visit:http://harriman.columbia.edu/files/harriman/OASIES_Conference2014_Program.pdf
Plenary Speakers:
Kevin Bruyneel (Politics, Babson College).
Jodi A. Byrd (English and American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Mark Rifkin (English and Women's and Gender Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro).
Dale Turner (Government and Native American Studies, Dartmouth College).
Respondents:
Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia University); Audra Simpson (Columbia University).
Presenters:
Phanuel Antwi (St Mary's University), Hadeel Assali (Columbia University), Bruno Cornellier (University of Winnipeg), Melissa Forbis (SUNY Stonybrook), Shiri Pasternak (Columbia University), Mezna Qato (Columbia University). And featuring artist Stephen Paul Jackson (presenting as Stron Softi) and filmmaker Hadeel Assali presenting on their creative work.
http://icls.columbia.edu/events/page/unsettlement_and_decolonization_new_directions
This conference is organized by Dr. Michael R. Griffiths Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University and co-sponsored by Department of Anthropology, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Center for Palestine Studies, INTERACT Initiative, The Middle East Institute, and The Heyman Center for the Humanities.
