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Digital Forays 2020-2021

Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
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@undertheraedar
Visualization of Population
Population of the Middle East Visualization

Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies  // 2020 - 2021

This year long series of workshops starts from a simple premise:

 What does it look like to think, engage, and do research in this digital age?

This question cuts across the ways we consume culture, digest news, carry out politics, and craft ourselves. This series is a call for researchers to account for the ever increasingly digital world in which we live. In order to better activate our scholarship we must reimagine our methods, modes of collaboration, and how to participate in these quickly changing digital landscapes.

Many junior scholars are now working across a digital multimedia landscape and they are pushing the genres of storytelling, engagement, augmentation - thus changing the scales and shapes of their scholarship. Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies addresses threads from the Digital Humanities (DH), but also from an array of other ambiguous buzzwords: "Digital Scholarship," "Public Humanities," "Digital Publishing,” “Big Data.” At stake in changing methodologies are a range of interconnected issues that amount to seismic shifts in how we deepen, develop, and disseminate our research. Indeed, at present, the perils/promise of our digital age are exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the most basic scholarly activities of teaching and research into online-compatible modalities - and ongoing dissent and protest in the Middle East (and around the world) where digital devices become appendages of how we capture, circulate, and remake the world.

Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies is an invitation to explore these changes with scholars, journalists, archivists, and activists who have been engaged in unorthodox & cutting-edge work. In planning this series a colleague suggested a foray (defined as: “an initial attempt into a new activity or area”) as a way to account for the provisionality and process of working digitally. As such, these conversations will assemble panelists to shed light on ways we narrate our present, produce and gather information, and how we might better understand & utilize digital infrastructures around us. 

Some guiding questions across the series:

  • What is “data” today? “Data’ from where, created by whom? How do we access, sift, sort, sample this information? How can one be critical of data, but also use it at the same time? 

  • How to make sense of the different archives, databases, and digitization projects that emerge across the region every year?  How do they allow for new means of collaboration, crowdsourcing, and community?

  • How might one begin to develop aspects of digital directions in research already underway? 

  • How are we teaching the “Middle East” with changing technologies? To whom? With what resources? What is the future of area studies in a digital age?

  • In a changing professional landscape, how can we deepen the skills and scholarship of our students that will go on to carry out cutting edge PhD research, while also helping students broaden their imaginations beyond the university?  

  • How are (how can) our students engage and produce work that blurs disciplines - but also scholarly/journalistic/artistic boundaries? 

  • What type of new digital projects are Junior Scholars/Phd Candidates struggling to imagine and produce in which these digital components are integral components to their projects? (databases, interfaces/websites, and archives)

  • What are the future directions of “Middle Eastern Studies” in an increasing digital world?

     

    Please also see DIGITAL FORAYS (www.digitalforays.com) - a platform of student group works that extend these events and illustrate how these events were integrated in our teaching!

     

Spring 2021:

March 4, 2021 |  DIGITAL FORAYS: DIGITAL DATA GATHERING & CHANGING WAYS OF KNOWING I: WITNESSING + PROOF + HUMAN RIGHTS with Hadi Al Khatib (Syrian Archive), Samira Koujok (Columbia University), Lorenzo Pezzani (Goldsmiths, University of London), and discussant Jillian York (EFF) Watch the recording here

March 18, 2021 | DIGITAL FORAYS: DIGITAL DATA GATHERING & CHANGING WAYS OF KNOWING II: SOCIAL MEDIA AFTERLIVES with Yakein Abdelmagid (Research Strategist), Marc Owen Jones (HBKU), Marlene Schäfers (University of Cambridge), and discussant Adel Iskandar (SFU) Watch the recording here 

April 1, 2021 | DIGITAL FORAYS: SPACE & PLACE I: CRITICAL MAPPING & COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHY with Majd Al-Shihabi (Systems Design Engineer), Nermin Elsherif (CHEurope), Ghazal Jafari (University of Virginia), and discussant Timur Hammond (Syracuse University) Watch the recording here

April 15, 2021 | DIGITAL FORAYS: SPACE & PLACE II: VISUALIZATION & DIGITAL STORYTELLING with Ahmad Barclay (Architect), Ahmad El-Gharbie' (American University of Beirut), Fabiola Hanna (The New School) and discussant Hatim El-Hibri (George Mason University) Watch the recording here
April 22, 2021 | DIGITAL FORAYS: FUTURE DIGITAL RESEARCH ON/IN/FROM THE MIDDLE EAST with Akram Khater (NC State University), Marina Rustow (Princeton University), David Joseph Wrisley (NYU), and Farès el-Dahdah (Rice University) Watch the recording here 

April 29, 2021 | DIGITAL FORAYS: LIGHTNING TALKS FROM JUNIOR SCHOLARS -- Open call to present - SUBMIT YOUR PROJECT!!!! -- bit.ly/NYUKevoDF429 (link to signup for event)  // Event Postponed due to Covid19

DF 2021

Fall 2020:

September 24, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS: MEDIATING THE NEWS: DIGITAL PLATFORMS & PUBLICS with Josette Khalil (MEGAPHONE), Gürkan Özturan (Dokuz8 Haber), Lina Attalah (Mada Masr) and discussant Bilge Yeşil | Watch the recording here

October 8, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS: ARCHIVES & ACTIVATION // PLATFORMS AND PUBLICS wiith Yazan Kopty (Imaging the Holy), Kristine Khouri (Arab Image Foundation), and discussant Laila Shereen Sakr (UCSB) | Watch the recording here 

October 15, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS: ARCHIVES & ACTIVATION // ARTISTS AND ACCESS with Asunción Molinos Gordo
(Artist), Mohammad Shawky Hassan (Artist), Diana Allan (McGill University), & Discussant Helga Tawil-Souri (NYU). In partnership with ArteEast & the Arab American National Museum) | Watch the recording here 

October 29, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS AND GLOBAL UPRISING: AESTHETICS OF DIGITAL DISSENT With Amal Khalaf, An Xiao Mina, Rebecca L. Stein and discussant Nicholas Mirzoeff | Watch the recording here 

November 5, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS AND GLOBAL UPRISING: ARCHIVING A REVOLUTION: SMARTPHONES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & PROTEST with Omar al Ghazzi (LSE), Jasmina Metwaly (Artist/Filmmaker), Isra Ali (NYU Steinhardt) and discussant Marie Grace Brown | Watch the recording here 

December 3, 2020 | DIGITAL FORAYS: REWIND, REPEAT, REHASH: HISTORY, MATERIALITY AND 'DIGITAL COLONIALISM’ With Roopika Risam (Salem State University), Morehshin Allahyari (Artist), Saima Akhtar (Independent Scholar) and Discussant Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (Copenhagen Business School) | Watch the recording here 

 

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