Public Events Series

2021/2022

This virtual series will explore both border and infrastructure in the larger Middle East, but through a lens of Elements. 

EARTH / AIR / FIRE / WATER will frame panels across the year and allow for new ways to explore materiality, mediation, and scale that problematize how we imagine both border and infrastructure.  Thinking elementally is to think through the material continuities between border and climate crises. It will problematize not just time and space, but changing relationships of ecology, construction, and movement in the social world around us. Each elemental theme will be addressed twice over the course of the year, and each panel will bring together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners across disciplines and fields to provide insights, field-fresh research, and original interventions into critical issues that concern the Middle East but branch out far beyond. Read more about the series here.

2020/2021

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. Read more about the series here.

2020/2021 

Global Uprising  // A year-long series 2020-2021:

Global Uprising is a year-long series that revolves around one question: how do we rethink collective action from our present?  Taking the current anti-racist uprising in America and the tenth anniversary of the Arab revolts as launching points for a set of workshops this series delves into the global coordinates of uprising today.  Read more about the series here.