December 3, 2014 @ 1:00pm
Research Hall 163 George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies Program and the Arab Studies Institute Ramy Essam is best known for his heady performances in Tahrir Square during the 18 days of the January 25 Revolution. His song, "Irhal!' ("Leave!"), became an anthem for the mass street protests against Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship: "We are all united, we demand one thing: Leave! Leave! Leave!" He played hours before the "Battle of the Camel" — the surreal pro-Mubarak offensive on Tahrir Square — and during the clashes was hit on the head with a rock. A foreign camera crew filmed him there the next day, head bandaged and defiant: "We will stay here until Hosni Mubarak goes. … I will sing again, I will not stop singing until [he] goes.” (AL-MONITOR)
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November 19, 2014 @ 8:00pm
JC Cinema George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies Program, Arab Studies Institute, and Middle East Etc. Film Club Ten years after the US-led war in Iraq, thousands of displaced Iraqi refugees are still facing a crisis in the United States, yet their personal stories have been under reported in mainstream news. Director Jehan Harney follows Nazar and Salam who fled Iraq to avoid threats by Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and Iraqi insurgents that see them as “traitors” for supporting US forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Once in the U.S., however, they find themselves without any resources or support, wondering in the end if their sacrifice was all worth it. Through their home videos, personal diaries, and media clips the film intimately captures their emotional, psychological, and physical struggles as they reconcile their hopes for a liberated Iraq with the harsh reality of refugees without a stable home. The Lost Dream is produced by ITVS and executive produced by Oscar-nominated documentarian (My Country, My Country) Laura Poitras. November 11, 2014 @ 4:30pm
Johnson Center Room G George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies Program, Arab Studies Institute, and Middle East Etc. Film Club Featuring... Eliane Raheb, director Do the changes/revolutions have a significant impact on Arab cinema? And if yes how? Is it in its form, content, language or institutions? What’s expected today from the Arab filmmakers nowadays? Are they fighting for new cinema laws, that disable censorship and give more liberty and freedom of expression? Will there be more space for independent movies on the market? We will try to answer these questions through taking some examples from the history of the Arab Cinema that were influenced by the winds of changes of the 60s, 70s and 80s eras (Algeria, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon), and compare them to today’s cinema trends in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, with a reflection on the role of cinema in times of changes, fiction v/s documentary. About The Director Eliane Raheb is born in Lebanon and is the director of 2 short films: The last screening and Meeting, and of the documentaries : Karib Baiid (So near yet so far), Intihar (Suicide) and Hayda Lubnan (“This is Lebanon”) which received the Excellency Award at the Yamagata film festival, and was broadcasted on ARTE/ZDF/ Al Jadeed and NHK. Layali Bala Noom (Sleepless nights) is her first feature documentary. With Nizar Hassan, she founded ITAR productions, and the cross media documentary Arabi Hor (Free Arabs) www.arabihor.com, a project on the dailies of people within the Arab revolutions, that produced 160 short documentaries aired online. She is also one of the founders of the cultural cooperative for cinema Beirut DC , where she was the artistic director of “Ayam Beirut al Cinem’iya” film festival for 6 editions. November 11, 2014
JC Cinema George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies Program, Arab Studies Institute, and Middle Etc. Film Club Featuring... Eliane Raheb, director Through the stories of Assaad Shaftari, a former high ranking intelligence officer in a Christian right wing militia, responsible for many casualties in the protracted civil war in Lebanon and Maryam Saiidi, the mother of Maher, a missing young communist fighter who disappeared in 1982, the film digs in the war wounds and asks if redemption and forgiveness are possible. Ranked as Top 5th among the best documentaries of 2013, by the Sight and sound magazine Reviews: “Director Eliane Raheb pulls no punches in her incisive, explosive debut, which also takes stabs at Lebanese bureaucracy and outsider forgiveness movements. By instigating jaw-dropping confrontations, Raheb reveals a damaged nation that refuses to examine the source of its pain. While Sleepless Nights is built around messy emotions and tumultuous friction, it’s photographed and edited with artistry and precision. It is a confounding triumph of political art, investigative journalism and confrontational cinema.” Columbia Daily Tribune “Playful and aggressive, elegant and confrontational, sardonic and melancholic, the dense film looks at the legacy of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war (1975-1990) through its discontents.” Filmcomment- Nicholas Rapold “The best new documentary at True/False was Sleepless Nights, a wrenching, narratively and thematically dense dual portrait of two people struggling to reconcile their experiences during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s.Sleepless Nights is a bold documentary that asks difficult questions about the process of truth and reconciliation in a country still divided among religious and political lines, but it’s also an example of a filmmaker trying to think and work in images.” POV magazine-Adam Nayman November 7, 2014 @ 7:30pm
Johnson Center Room 239A George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies Program, Arab Studies Institute, and Middle East Etc. Film Club Pizza and refreshments provided Nominated for the Palm d'Or at Cannes, The Time That Remains is an intimate, semi-autobiographical portrait of Palestinians living as a minority in their own homeland from the time Israel declared its independence in 1948 to the present day. October 20, 2014 @ 4:00pm - 6:30pm
Johnson Center, Room C George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program, the Trans-Arab Research Institute, Arab Studies Institute, New Century College, and Global Programs Featuring.. David J. Luban Georgetown University, Georgetown Law Center Margaret deGuzman Temple University, Beasley School of Law George Bisharat University of California, Hastings College of the Law Noura Erakat George Mason University, New Century College Kevin Jon Heller University of London, SOAS In July and August, hostilities in the Gaza Strip left 2,131 Palestinians and 71 Israelis dead, including 501 Palestinian children and one Israeli child. Of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents, 475,000 are living in temporary shelters or with other families because their homes have been severely damaged. The extent of destruction has raised questions around culpability for war crimes on all sides of the conflict. International organizations including the United Nations Human Rights Council, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for independent investigation. Palestine is considering accession to the Rome Statute, which would grant the International Criminal Court the authority to investigate war crimes conducted in Palestinian territory. Such an investigation would bring both Israel and Palestine under scrutiny for events from this summer and as far back as 2012, and possibly to 2002 when the ICC was first formed to investigate war crimes. This panel will explore the relevant legal questions under international criminal law as well as the political issues related to ICC accession by Palestine. SPEAKER BIOS David Luban is University Professor and Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Chicago. In addition to his Georgetown responsibilities, he is currently the Class of 1984 Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, United States Naval Academy. In 2012-13 he co-directed the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. Luban has also directed Georgetown's Center on National Security and Law. Luban's books include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (Princeton University Press, 1988), Legal Modernism (University of Michigan Press, 1994), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Torture, Power, and Law (Cambridge University Press), as well as several edited anthologies on legal ethics, textbooks on international criminal law, and legal ethics. His books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish - most recently a book-length Spanish translation of A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity. His writing includes more than 150 articles on international criminal law, moral and legal philosophy, professional ethics, law and literature, just war theory, and issues surrounding the U.S. "war on terrorism." He has testified before both houses of the U.S. Congress. Luban is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and received the American Bar Foundation's Keck Award and the New York Bar Association's Levy Award, both for distinguished scholarship. In 2011 he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University. Luban joined the Georgetown faculty from the University of Maryland. He has held visiting chairs at the Fordham, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools; been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel); and a visiting professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College and the University of Melbourne. A frequent speaker in the United States, he has lectured in fifteen other countries. Luban is on the editorial boards of Ethics & International Affairs and Legal Ethics, and is a Founding Editor of the weblog Just Security. He has served on the D.C. Bar's ethics committee, and chaired the AALS Sections on Professional Responsibility and on Law and Interpretation, as well as the Committee on Law and Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association. Margaret M. deGuzman teaches criminal law, international criminal law, and transitional justice. Her research engages questions about the appropriate role of international criminal law in the global legal order, with a particular focus on the concept of gravity. She has authored a number of publications on such issues as the definitions of international crimes, the role of case and situational gravity in the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the theoretical underpinnings of selection decisions at the ICC. She is currently participating in an international expert group drafting a model code for the investigation and prosecution of international crimes. Professor deGuzman is a graduate of Yale Law School, the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Irish Center for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland. Before joining the Temple faculty, Professor deGuzman clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced law in San Francisco for six years, specializing in criminal defense. Her cases involved charges ranging from insider trading and trade secret theft to mail fraud and drug trafficking. Professor deGuzman also served as a legal advisor to the Senegal delegation at the Rome Conference on the International Criminal Court and as a law clerk in the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. George E. Bisharat was a trial lawyer for the Office of the Public Defender in San Francisco before joining the UC Hastings faculty in 1991. Professor Bisharat studied law, anthropology, and Middle East studies at Harvard, and wrote a book about Palestinian lawyers working under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. He writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East, both for academic audiences and for major media sources in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Bisharat is an avid fly fisher, sometimes in such exotic locations as Russia and New Zealand, and also writes articles for fly-fishing magazines. He sings and plays blues harmonica, and occasionally forms bands with student musicians to perform at UC Hastings events. His wife, Jaleh Bisharat, is a business marketing specialist, and his children, Valerie and Austin, are a source of pleasure and pride. Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University where she teaches in the legal studies, international studies, and human rights/social justice studies concentrations. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. Upon completing law school, Noura received a New Voices Fellowship to develop a litigation unit aimed at redressing Palestinian human rights claims under the ATS in US federal courts. She went on to serve as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. In Spring 2010, Noura worked with a Lebanese human rights attorney to file habeus corpus petitions on behalf of Iraqi refugees detained by Lebanese authorities. Upon leaving Lebanon, she became the Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights where she represented their claims before the Human Rights Council, human rights treaty bodies, among the UN diplomatic missions as well as among the US Administration and Congress. Her scholarly publications include: "U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction" in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review, and "Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement," forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law . Noura’s media appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. She has published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the co-editor with Mouin Rabbani of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. Kevin Jon Heller is currently Professor of Criminal Law. Until 2014, he was Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School, where he also served as Project Director for International Criminal Law at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, a joint project of Melbourne Law School and the Australian Defence Force. He holds a PhD in law from Leiden University, a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School, an MA with honours in literature from Duke University, and an MA and BA in sociology, both with honours, from the New School for Social Research. Kevin’s academic writing has appeared in a variety of journals, including the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Criminal Law Forum, and the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review. His books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press, 2013) (edited with Gerry Simpson); and The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford University Press, 2011) (edited with Markus Dubber). He is currently writing a book entitled A Geneology of International Criminal Law, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015. For the past eight years, Kevin has also been a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris. On the practical side, Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court’s negotiations over the crime of aggression, served as Human Rights Watch’s external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and served from December 2008 until February 2011 as one of Radovan Karadzic's formally-appointed legal associates. He consults regularly with a variety of UN organisations (such as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan — UNAMA) and human rights groups (such as Gisha and Human Rights First) and is a core trainer for Professionals in Humanitarian Assistance and Protection, a Brussels-based NGO that conducts IHL trainings in various locations around the world. Live Stream Link: 4pm Washington DC 9pm GMT 11pm Beirut http://ustre.am/1hOyN April 28, 2014 @ 3:00pm - 5:30pm
Mason Hall, Room D3 George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by Middle East Studies Program, Center for Global Islamic Studies, Arab Studies Institute, Public & International Affairs Department Light Fare and Refreshments Served Featuring... Lisa Hajjar: On Human Rights (UCSB) Bassam Haddad: On Syria (GMU) Ziad Abu-Rish: On Jordan (UCLA) Peter Mandaville: On Islamists (GMU) Mouin Rabbani: On Palestine (ASI) Nadya Sbaiti: On Lebanon (Smith College) Adel Iskandar: On The Media (Georgetown) Elliott Colla: On Literature (Georgetown) Noura Erakat: On Law (Temple) KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ON THE MIDDLE EAST How has the region been studied, researched, taught, and represented in the past three years? What have we learned about the societies, regional/international relations, and political-economic dynamics of Arab countries? What are the salient debates in the region? Have counter-revolutionary forces triumphed? How did external intervention promote or hinder the uprisings? Is it time to do away with the secular/Islamist binary? Are we likely to see more equitable distribution of resources in the region? Beyond politics, how have cultural elements/forms been affected, developed, and/or created? Join us for some answers. Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at the University of California -- Santa Barbara. Her research and writing focus on law and legality, war and conflict, human rights, and torture. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2012). In addition to being a Co-Editor at Jadaliyya, she serves on the editorial committees of Middle East Report and Journal of Palestine Studies. She is currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the United States. In 2014-2015, she will be the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Bassam is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. His most recent book is a co-edited volume with the title Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The "Other" Threat. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East, and Founding Editor of Tadween Publishing. Ziad Abu-Rish is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is co-editor ofThe Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Older Order? (2012), and author of "Protests, Regime Stability, and the History of Authoritarian State Formation in Jordan" in the forthcoming edited volume Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (2014). Ziad serves as a senior editor of the Arab Studies Journal, and is a co-editor of Jadaliyya. In fall 2014, he will begin his position as assistant professor of Middle East history at Ohio University. Peter Mandaville is a professor of government & politics and Co-Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, where he also directs the graduate program in Middle East & Islamic Studies. He is the author of Islam & Politics (2nd edition, forthcoming 2014) and Reimagining the Ummah: Transnational Muslim Politics (2001) as well as co-editor of several volumes of essays in the fields of international relations, Islamic Studies, and comparative politics. He has also worked and consulted extensively in the non-profit, think tank, and government sectors. His research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mouin Rabbani is a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Contributing Editor of Middle East Report and Policy Advisor with Al-Shabaka. He has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the contemporary Middle East. He was formerly a Senior Middle East Analyst with the International Crisis Group, Palestine Director of the Palestinian American Research Centre, and researcher with Al-Haq. He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine. Nadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor of History at Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. She is co-editor of theArab Studies Journal, and a co-founder of Jadaliyya.com. Adel Iskandar is a scholar of Arab studies whose research focuses on media and communication. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of several works including Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press), and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing). Iskandar's work deals with media, identity and politics and has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His most recent publication is the authored anthology Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (AUC Press). Iskandar teaches at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Elliott Colla is author of Baghdad Central and Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. He is also translator of works of Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan's The Heron, Idris Ali's Poor, Ibrahim Al-Koni's Gold Dust and Raba'i al-Madhoun's The Lady from Tel Aviv. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and writer. She is currently a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple University, Beasley School of Law and is a member of the Legal Support Network for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. She has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. Most recently she served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. She has helped to initiate and organize several national formations including Arab Women Arising for Justice (AMWAJ) and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN). She is a board member of the Institute for Policy Studies; a Policy Advisor of Al-Shabaka; a founding member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival; and a contributor toIntLawGrrls. Noura has appeared on MSNBC's "Up With Chris Hayes," Fox’s “The O’ Reilly Factor,” NBC’s“Politically Incorrect,” Democracy Now, and Al-JazeeraArabic and English. Her scholarly publications include: "Litigating the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Politicization of U.S. Federal Courts" in the Berkeley Law Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, "U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction" in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, and “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” forthcoming in the Arizona Law Review. She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.com. She will begin teaching in the New Century College at George Mason University in the Fall 2014. April 3, 2014 @ 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Johnson Center Cinema George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Presented by the Middle East Studies & Arab Studies Institute. C0-Sponsored by Global Interdisciplinary Programs, Center for Global Islamic Studies, Center For Global Studies, Department of Public and International Affairs Featuring... Omar Dahi • Hampshire College/Jadaliyya Material Roots of the Uprising: Rethinking the Economic Thesis Rochelle Davis • Georgetown University Gender, Danger, and Vulnerability: Syrian Men and War Yasser Munif • Emerson College Participatory Democracy and Local Governance in Manbij Ibrahim Hamidi • Al-Hayat Newspaper, London Reporting on Syria Lisa Wedeen • University of Chicago/Jadaliyya Scenes of Generational Change: Notes from the Syrian Uprising Bassam Haddad • George Mason University/Jadaliyya Understanding the Syrian Tragedy: Economics, Politics, and Regional Relations Daniel Neep • Georgetown University Class, Sect, and the State Prior to the Uprising Osama Esber • Tadween Publishing Syrian Writers/Intellectuals and the Uprising SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIESBassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Bassam is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. His most recent book is a co-edited volume with the title Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The "Other" Threat. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East, and Founding Editor of Tadween Publishing. Osama Esber is a Syrian poet, short story writer, publisher and translator who presently lives in Chicago. He is director of the publishing House Bidayat (Beginnings) based in Damscus. Among his poetry collections are: Screens of History (1994); The Accord of Waves (1995); Repeated Sunrise over Exile (2004); and Where He Doesn’t Live (2006). His short story collections are entitled The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996); Coffee of the Dead (2000); and Rhythms of a Different Time (in process). He has translated works by Michael Ondaatje, Terry Eagleton, Richard Ford, Bertrand Russell, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Noam Chomsky, to name a few. Daniel Neep is Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown in 2013, he was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter, England. He also worked for nearly 3 years as Research Director (Syria) for the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), in which capacity he was based in Damascus throughout the first year of the Syrian uprising before relocating to Amman, Jordan. Before moving into academia, Neep was Head of the Middle East & North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), a foreign policy think tank in London, from 2002 to 2004. He has spent several years in Syria since the late 1990s, variously studying, working, and researching. He is the author of Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Space, Insurgency and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently working on a new research project looking at the spatial and economic dimensions of state formation in Syria from 1920 to 2011. Rochelle Davis is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Academic Director in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan in Modern Arabic Literature and Anthropology. Her research focuses on refugees and conflict. She’s published numerous reports on Syrian refugees post-2011, Iraqi refugees who fled to Jordan, and a book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2010), which addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war. Yasser Munif is a professor of sociology at Emerson College where he teaches courses on nationalism, political economy, Middle Eastern politics, and social movements. He recently spent several months in Northern Syria where he is conducting research on local governance, post-Assad reconstruction, and internally displaced persons. He is a co-founder of the "Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution" which aims to shed light on grassroots resistance and everyday struggles in Syria. Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999); “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004),Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008), “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009), “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010), and “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. She is currently working on a book about ideological interpellation, neoliberal autocracy, and generational change in present-day Syria. Ibrahim Hamidi is a Syrian journalist, who heads the Damascus bureau of Arab daily newspaper Al-Hayat, and contributes to several other international media outlets and thinktanks. Previously, he served as head of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) office in Damascus, in addition to his work with al-Hayat, and as a senior writer for Forward Magazine in Damascus. Hamidi's work focuses on strategic issues in the Middle East, with special insight into Syria's internal and regional politics. He is also a Research Fellow and co-founder of the Syrian Studies Center at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Hamidi is also a co-founder of the Arab Investigative Journalism Program (ARIJ). Hamidi is married to writer and novelist Dima Wannous, daughter of the acclaimed Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous. Omar S. Dahi is an associate professor of economics at Hampshire College and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. He specializes in economic development and international trade, with a focus on South-South economic relations and the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Dahi also serves on the editorial team of the Middle East Report and is co-editor of the Syria page at Jadaliyya. Dahi’s work has been published in various academic journals, including the Journal of Development Economics, Applied Economics, and the Southern Economic Journal. March 2, 2013 @ 11:30am
CGIS South Building, Belfer Caste Study Room 020 Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts Presented by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The Political Anthropology Working Group, and Jadaliyya Open to the public A discussion of the Gezi Park protests, which erupted in Istanbul in late May 2013, and their aftermath. This event coincides with the launch of the JadMag volume, “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey, published by Jadaliyya and Tadween Publishing—a collection of essays intended as a pedagogical resource for those teaching and studying recent events in Turkey. Panelists The Politics of Knowledge Production Today: Pedagogy, Policy, and Real Time, Bassam Haddad, Director of Middle Eastern Studies Program and Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, George Mason University & Jadaliyya Co-Founder and Co-Editor Constructing Politics: Infrastructure and Public Space in Istanbul, Elizabeth Angell, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Columbia University & Contributor to the JadMag Volume Heterogeneous Rootedness: Gezi as a Global Event in Contemporary Turkish Literature, Ceyhun Arslan, PhD Candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Engendering Biographies & Bibliographies: Women's Movement, Critical Media Practice, and Gezi, Cihan Tekay, PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology, The CUNY-Graduate Center & Jadaliyya Turkey Page Co-Editor Formations of the Areligious: Secularism, Islamism and Alignments of Dissent after Gezi, Emrah Yildiz, Joint PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University & JadaliyyaTurkey Page and JadMag Volume Co-Editor Moderator: Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, Department of History, Harvard University A reception in the CGIS South concourse followed the panel. Special thanks to artist Taha Alkan for permission to use "Lady in Red Dress" (2013). |
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