Status/الوضع Audio Magazine: Issue 4.1

Issue 4.1 of Status/الوضع Audio Magazine is live on StatusHour.com! Read about the new issue below and visit the website to listen:

Status/الوضع Audio Magazine Issue 4.1
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"With the Middle East and North Africa facing social and political convulsions resulting from a muscular resurgent authoritarianism, a mobilization of fractious divisive sectarianism, and a resistant revolutionary impulse that admonishes both, there is an urgent need to document and deliberate, archive and articulate. It is during these times, and in response to six years of impulsive reportage about the region which has eviscerated context and effaced complexity, that we must be committed to an unabashed anthropological sensitivity to lives forged under these circumstances in locales. That is why this issue of Status, more so than any previous one, was curated with a clear and present desire to situate abstract phenomena in local situations, localize the regional, locate the voices that speak to communities in flux, and see the local for what it is—simultaneously rooted and uprooted. For us in Status, understanding what is taking place in the region necessitates throwing away the broad brush altogether and instead using fine lines to dialogue with subnational, municipal, familial, solidaristic, and even solitary experiences.

It is in the magnificence of minutia that we are able to truly appreciate the changes—simultaneously cataclysmic and exuberant--currently taking place in locales from besieged Yemeni mountain villages, politically disparaged Palestinian municipalities, and resistant Syrian archaeological communities to victimized Mosul families, embattled Turkish dissenters, and virtually-extinct Egyptian journalists. Yet one should not mistake commitment to amplifying locale with the dislocation of intersectionality nor with the absence of translocal commitments. To the contrary, we are convinced that solidarity must be grounded in a genuine commitment to locale. One can no longer discuss Syria’s catastrophic war without comprehending mass suffering in Yemen. One can longer discuss the calamitous experiences of First Nations communities of the Americas without contemplating the settler colonial project in Palestine. Poetry written by Arab Americans is at once located here, there, and in the interstitial spaces between them.

​We hope that you will take the time to peruse and be in dialogue with, not simply listen to, the expressive, informative and inspiring interviews that we carefully, painstakingly and meticulously curated in this most local of Status issues."

Continue reading on Jadaliyya: STATUS/الوضع: Issue 4.1 is Live!
Issue 4.1: Status/الوضع Issue 4.1