Events
The Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies supports events that increase awareness of the history and cultures of the Middle East and Muslim civilizations, and values diverse perspectives that promote dialogue and understanding. Events listed here originate from a variety of campus units and community organizations. The listing of an event does not constitute endorsement of or agreement with the views presented therein.
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October 2020
Lecture: “Blackness in Malaysia and Indonesia: Stories from the Field” with Professor Timothy Daniels
Daniels is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Hofstra University. Before joining the faculty at Hofstra, he completed his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He teaches anthropology, religious studies, linguistic anthropology, and urban studies. His research has spanned multiple field sites in Malaysia and Indonesia. His research interests include urban space and ethnicity, globalization and culture, traditional arts and cultural performances, and Islamic law and ethics. His initial field research projects…
Find out more »Virtual Lecture: “Chronopolitical Assemblages: How gender reassignment makes racial genus in modern Iran”” with Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou, Berea College
Join Duke Alumni as they talk to the personal, intellectual, academic, and spiritual trajectory through life, Duke, and graduate school. Register in advance. This talk examines the co-constitutive relationship between race/ism, sexuality, and time in modern Iran to argue that contemporary Iranians use a racial calculus to measure sexed and gendered modernity. It intervenes in how Iranians today narrate their experiences of gender non-conformity in popular media produced for the West to suggest that gender in Iran is a code…
Find out more »Twenty First Annual TISS New Faces Conference
Advanced graduate students in the security studies field will present their research and engage in conversation with the TISS Community. Advanced Registration Required. Presenters include Gregoire Phillips (University of California at Davis), Velvet Gloves on Iron Fists: Media, Persuasion, and Power in Modern Extremism. More information and register. How do rebels gain and maintain local support while also engaging in costly war? In this dissertation, I argue that rebels leverage the influence and reach of modern media to translate…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Racialization of Refugees in the EU” – “Encountering Difference, Embodying Boundaries, and Unsettling Borders: Middle Eastern Refugees and Immigrants in the European Union”
This panel focuses broadly on the ways that refugees and other migrants from the Middle East to Europe experience and/or respond to discrimination and exclusion. We hope to better understand how both new and old forms of racism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and other processes of differentiation shape the experiences of migrants, and we are especially interested in new perspectives that the lens of race brings to the study of Middle Eastern migrants in the EU. Panelists Include: Nathan Swanson,…
Find out more »Roundtable: “Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation” with Fadi Bardawil (Duke)
Registration Required. This conversation will cover the recently published book, "Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke U. Press 2020)," by Fadi Bardawil (AMES, Duke). Discussants that will participate include: Joan Scott (School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study), Yasmeen Diafallah (Politics, UC Santa Cruz), Gary Wilder (Anthropology, CUNY) and will be chaired by Cemil Aydın (History, UNC). The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice,…
Find out more »A Conversation: “Mohammad Darawshe: Shared Society: Perspective of Israeli-Arabs”
Registration Required. Join Professors Abdullah Antepli and David Schanzer as they speak with Mohammad Darawshe, leading political analyst and expert on Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel. Mr. Darawshe is considered to be a leading political analyst in Arabic Press, He is an expert on Jewish-Arab relations; presented lectures and papers at the European parliament, NATO Defense College, The World Economic Forum, Club de Madrid, US Congress, Herzlia Conference, Globes Conference, The Marker Conference, Haaretz Conference, and Israel's Presidential Conference.…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Digital Forays and Global Uprising: Aesthetics of Digital Dissent”
Since the Arab Spring, the protests and dissent have only become more audio-visually mediated with an instantaneity and ubiquity that is never merely ‘formal.’ The mediation and the aesthetics are in many ways also the uprisings themselves. What types of imagery are being captured, circulated, and remade in these moments of conflict—and how do they travel from one site of conflict into others around the globe? What devices, channels of communication, and infrastructures allow and/or impede such exchanges? What…
Find out more »Virtual Lecture: “US construction of race and how to disrupt racist systems” with Kiah Glenn, Elon University (Center for Race, Ethnicity & Diversity Education)
Join Duke Alumni as they talk to the personal, intellectual, academic, and spiritual trajectory through life, Duke, and graduate school. Register in advance. Kiah Glenn, Assistant Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity & Diversity Education at Elon University will be with us for this talk on the US construction of race and how to disrupt racist systems. More information. This event is sponsored by the Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, The Department…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Refugees and the “Crisis” of States: Rethinking Border Regimes and the State Technologies in the EU” – “Encountering Difference, Embodying Boundaries, and Unsettling Borders: Middle Eastern Refugees and Immigrants in the European Union”
Instead of a refugee "crisis" that often frames refugees as the problem, this panel locates the problem with existing states and border regimes. We seek to understand the state and state-making practices through refugee experiences. We ask what we learn about the shortcomings of current systems of governance and territoriality through an examination of state-refugee interactions and state policies targeting refugee populations. Panelists Include: Martina Tazzioli, Goldsmiths, University of London Banu Gökarıksel, Devran Koray Öcal, Betül Aykaç University…
Find out more »November 2020
Panel Discussion: “Digital Forays and Global Uprising: Archiving A Revolution: Smartphones, Social Media, & Protest”
If social media was hailed as crucial to the start of the Arab Spring, what has the last 10 years brought in terms of increasing cellphone connectivity, usage, and entwinement in our lives? A flood of research pinpointed changing digital access/practices as linchpins of the Arab Spring (perhaps overly simplistically, or correct) - but what is our perspective looking back over the last 10 years? How do/did we archive the “Arab Spring” and the other swells of protest and…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Learning, Teaching, and Community-Building with Refugees” – “Encountering Difference, Embodying Boundaries, and Unsettling Borders: Middle Eastern Refugees and Immigrants in the European Union”
This roundtable brings together scholars, activists, and NGO volunteers to discuss how to learn from and with refugees, teach about refugees, and engage with refugee communities. What are the strategies for resisting the racialization and marginalization of refugees and for developing an appreciation of refugee experiences, knowledge, and contributions to societies? What interventions in research, in the classroom, and in community organizing are required to promote ethical engagements with refugees and to maximize benefits flowing from these engagements to…
Find out more »Lecture: “James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade Revisited” with Magdalena Zaborowska (U. of Michigan)
Lecture Registration Link. Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, researches, writes on, and teaches literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender; African American literature, life writing, material culture, immigrant ethnicities, feminist, and critical race theory; American Studies, post-totalitarian East-Central Europe. Author of James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University Press, 2009). Discussant:…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Global Uprising: Dispossession, Extraction, Plunder”
Most agree that rampant inequalities, which even policymakers are admitting constitute a “new great divergence” not seen since the Industrial Revolution, are at the heart of protest movements everywhere. If this has been only intensified by a global pandemic that might be taking us from recession into depression then the stakes seem only heavier. But how far do we need to understand the uprising as not only movements against inequality, but as more systemic expressions of a refusal…
Find out more »December 2020
Panel Discussion: “Digital Forays: Rewind, Repeat, Rehash: History, Materiality And ‘Digital Colonialism’”
Even TeenVogue gets it: “if you take away imperial plunder, what else do you have to offer?” Yet then how do we make sense of a 3D life-sized reconstruction of the arches of Palmyra, destroyed by ISIS, but now on a tour through Western Capitals as a spectacle reclaimed through digital methods? We lament the “loss” of this heritage - but we laude the tools that helped us “preserve” and recreate it. The Middle East is continually framed as…
Find out more »Panel Discussion: “Global Uprising: Inequality, Corruption, Financialization”
The emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement nearly a decade ago provided a particularly new rhetoric of protest that has persisted across uprisings, political debates, and numerous crises that have come in its wake. “We are the 99%” identified economic inequality as a central problem that unified many concurrent and overlapping concerns regarding taxation, employment, wealth, kleptocracy, financialization, corruption, neoliberalism, race, etc. Over the course of the last decade, however, wealth inequality has only worsened, and the knotty…
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