POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MIDDLE EAST:
​CONTINUITIES & DISCONTINUITIES IN TEACHING & RESEARCH

6 November 2015
Fairfax, Virginia
On 6-7 November 2015, we held a Political Economy Project Pedagogy Workshop at George Mason University. The event involved a two-part public event on Friday 6 November that began with research presentations by Max Ajl, who gave a talk entitled
“Event and Conjuncture: Braudel, Political Economy, and the Tunisian Uprising”, and Melisande Genat whose talk was on Iraqi Kurdish collective towns during the 1970s. These presentations were followed by the second part of the event focused on the challenges of teaching the political economy of the Middle East in the contemporary period. In this part, five presenters engaged key pedagogical issues and challenges of teaching about the region from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. The goal here was to highlight the connections between our research and teaching and strategies f or illuminating key political economy questions in the classroom. The second day of the workshop involved all seven participants discussing and planning activities of the PEP Pedagogy Working Group. These discussions involved strategizing about how best to collect and disseminate pedagogical material, such as syllabi, as well as expanding the network of instructors who could draw on PEP’s pedagogical activities. The goal was to identify the main structure, goals, and future activities of the working group. The workshop also involved preliminary planning for a Political Economy Summer Institute (PESI) to be held in June 2016 at George Mason University. This Institute will bring together scholars and graduate students conducting work on the political economy of the
Middle East to engage in a series of structured discussions around methodological and theoretical issues in conducting research. Participants reviewed letters of interest that had been submitted by over 70 graduate students who expressed interesting in participating in the workshop.
More Political Economy Project Workshops

Highlights

Organizers
Bassam Haddad
Samer Abboud

Papers & Presentations
Melisande Genat, Stanford  University
From Agrarian Experiments in the Context of Socialist ''Villagization''  to Population Displacements:
Iraqi Kurdish Collective Towns During  the Seventies  

Max Ajl, Cornell University
Event and Conjuncture: Braudel, Political Economy, and the Tunisian Uprising

Omar Dahi, Hampshire  College
Against the Grain: Syrian Refugees and the Political Economy of Survival

Shana Marshall, George  Washington  University
Do not go quietly:
Human agency, contingency, and the push to formulate a structural explanation of the Arab Spring

Ziad Abu Rish, Ohio  University
Revisiting the Merchant Republic:
​Lebanon in Comparative Perspective

Samer Abboud, Arcadia  University
The World Bank, the Arab Uprisings, and the Poverty of Neoliberal 
Repetition

Bassam  Haddad, George  Mason  University
 Incorporating Class and Capital in Teaching the Middle East:   
The Case of Syria, Then and Now