Digital Forays: Space & Place I: Critical Mapping & Counter-Cartography

Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies // A year-long series 2020-2021:

This year long series starts from a simple premise: What does it look like to think, engage, and do research in this digital age?  This is not a call for researchers to simply produce digital outputs - but we live in an ever increasingly digital world. In order to better activate our scholarship, and to grasp the terrain in which our research questions unfold, we must reimagine our methods, modes of collaboration, and how to participate in a quickly changing digital landscape. See full series overview

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SPACE & PLACE I:
CRITICAL MAPPING & COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHY

April 1, 2021 / 12:30-2PM (NYC/EST Time) / Zoom signup

Critical mapping is thought of as a practice that presents maps “against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals" (Hodgson 2002). How are scholars, practitioners, and activists in the region using digital spatial practices to disrupt, pushback, and flip narratives and think of spatial issues anew? Through questions of history, urbanism, and place these three practitioners illustrate individual & collaborative initiatives currently being realized. Their projects push new boundaries of regional critical/counter/alter/collaborative/re- mapping practices. Through their work - and looking forward - what issues face scholars & activists for future counter spatial representations & research in the region?

Join the Kevorkian Center with Majd Al-Shihabi, Nermin Elsherif, Ghazal Jafari and discussant Timur Hammond on April 1, 2021 at 12:30 pm (EST) to think through these questions and discuss together issues of platforms and publics. To register please follow the link here or copy and paste the link to your browser: bit.ly/NYUKevoDF41

Originally of Persian/Azeri descent and currently living in the United States, Dr. Jafari left Iran in 2007 in a mass exodus of Iranian youth due to geopolitical struggle and socioeconomic violence. With a co-commitment to relations between cultural sovereignty, self-determination, and the future of land, she has been researching and documenting the complex, multi-dimensional, and transnational dimensions of systemic dispossession and colonialism that prevail in the Middle East and the Americas, while simultaneously documenting trajectories of cultural and political resurgence in the Middle East through women’s resistance and indigenous ecological praxis. She is a founding Director of OPEN SYSTEMS, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to opening systemic knowledge related to complex, socioecological challenges and geopolitical conflicts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Prof. Hammond’s primary research interests include the Middle East, Turkey, cultural geography, urban geography, religion, and identity. Prof. Hammond’s scholarship has been recognized with several awards and honors. In 2013, he won the doctoral student paper competition in multiple specialty groups of the Association of American Geographers. For his doctoral research, Prof. Hammond was awarded Fulbright funding and a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey. To complete his dissertation, he received a writing grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies, in addition to multiple fellowships from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prof. Hammond is a member of many specialty groups in the Association of American Geographers, as well as the Middle East Studies Association.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by March 25, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available within a month to our Youtube page.

Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on our Youtube page.