Member Calls for Participation
If you are organizing a panel or roundtable for the MESA 2012 meeting in Denver and would like to place a call for participants OR you have a paper in mind you'd like to present and would like to find a panel, please send your details to Mark Lowder at mlowder@email.arizona.edu. Include the title of the proposed panel or paper, a brief description of the topic, your contact information, and the date by which you would like to receive responses.
Calls for Papers
Topic: Seasons of Activism and Dissent: Historical Precedents and the ‘Arab Spring’
Organizer: Annie C. Higgins, Assistant Professor of Arabic,
College of Charleston, SC
Contact: treesupreaching@gmail.com
Contact organizer by: February 13, 2012
This panel will take a cross-historical approach to the concepts of activism and dissent through lenses of history, as a contextual background for current scenes and changes in Arab countries. While much analysis is being undertaken of the various ‘Arab Springs’ from a ‘being-there’ standpoint, there is a need for seeing threads of continuity or even disconnected gusts in previous seasons of dissent. You may have examples that involve religious, political, ethnic, economic, tax-revolting, literary, or even poetically-metrical ideas and actions that have shaken up an entrenched system. The many histories layering themselves through experiences in Arab lands provide the insights to complicate discussions of the immediate present. Historical precedents, with their necessary differences and paradoxes, can bring valuable depth, shadow, and color to perceptions of current events and even to possible futures.
If you would like to participate in this proposed panel, please notify me right away.
And then I would like to ask for the full 400-word maximum abstract by Monday, February 13. Many thanks!
Topic: Transnational Connections and the Reform of Islamic Education, 1890-1950
Organizer: Hilary Kalmbach
Contact: hilary.kalmbach@new.ox.ac.uk
This panel looks at the transnational networks that ran through educational institutions and connect contexts within the Middle East, as well as parts of the Middle East with Europe and other Muslim countries between 1890-1950 (with the possibility of extending to 1970). It focuses specifically on schools and universities with strong ties to Islamic education or knowledge, and looks at:
- how institutions have been shaped by patterns of transnational exchange that bring together students and staff from a diverse range of places, and
- how the ideas and practices espoused by an educational institution spread through the transnational movement of their graduates and teachers.
As a result, the panel provides insight into how not only national contexts, but also transnational networks, influence the impact educational institutions have on the spread of ideas, ideologies, and practices impacting religion, education, society, and culture. The panel's relatively wide temporal and geographical focus provides a window into the wide range of roles played by transnational networks in Islamic education.
Paper one examines the transnational reach of graduates of Cairo's Dar al-'Ulum school (an institution that taught Islamic sciences in the framework of a modern, European-style school) especially as teachers and scholars of Arabic and Islam in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia from the 1890s through the 1940s. Paper two looks at the role played by transnational exchange in the pedagogical development of the Mahad 'Ilmi Sa'udi in Mecca, the first post-primary educational institution established by the third Saudi state in 1927, with the goal of training teachers to staff its nascent modern education system.
We are looking to recruit two further papers on the theme of transnational networks and Islamic educational institutions in the twentieth century. If you have a paper that would coordinate with or expand upon the scheme outlined above, please send a 400-word abstract to hilary.kalmbach@new.ox.ac.uk no later than Sunday 12 February, and be prepared to register with and submit to MESA no later than 15 February.
For more information about the conference, see http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/annual-meeting/call-for-papers.html
Topic: Public Discourse in 20th Century Iraq
Organizer: Fadi Dawood, Department of History, SOAS, University of London
Contact: fadi_dawood@soas.ac.uk
Contact Organizer by: Feb 5th, 2012
British colonial officials carved the modern Iraqi state, from three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. Academics have devoted a considerable deal of attention to the political, social, and cultural processes that have influenced the creation of the modern Iraqi state. However, more work needs to be done on individual, group, and state contributions to public discourse, which shaped the political and social debate within the public sphere in 20th century Iraq. As a result the central questions this panel will ask: How did individuals, groups, and the state influence and contribute to public discourse within 20th century Iraq? How can we as historians and social scientists incorporate these ideas into the larger literature on Iraq and the larger post-Ottoman Middle East?
Topic: Family law reform and political change in the MENA region
Organizer: Dörthe Engelcke, katja Zvan Elliott, Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
Inquiries: dorthe.engelcke@sant.ox.ac.uk and/or katja.zvan@sant.ox.ac.uk
Contact organizer by: 10 February 2012
The panel will address to what extent family law reform in the MENA region has led to political change and whether it has affected state-society relations on the formal and the informal levels and gender relations more generally. The aim is to overcome the paradigm that sees women’s groups – secular feminists and Islamist women – and the state in strictly “divisional” terms – i.e. the women’s groups being somehow in clear opposition to each other and to the state, and to consider to a greater extent the overlap between these groups. Attention will be given to the cooperation between formal and informal actors within the family law reform process and the question of who is allowed to participate in this process and subsequently able to shape the outcome of it. How have the CEDAW-convention and the international discourse on women shaped the way in which these different groups try to advance their claims and their ability to influence the process?
Moreover, one of the less researched questions about family law reforms and the heightened presence of women's rights discourse is whether these processes have affected social reality and, if yes, in what ways. Has the state ensured the application of the law? Are laws truly ameliorating women's legal status and creating gender equality, or does a careful reading of the text of the law reveal reconsolidation of patriarchal family and gender relations?
Topic: Globalization, Modernization and Social Change in Contemporary Iran
Organizer: Soheyl Amini, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Salve Regina University
Inquiries: soheyl.amini@salve.edu
Contact organizer by: February 10, 2012.
The general theme of the panel allows its participants to present a broad spectrum of topics touching upon the increasing influence of globalization and modernity on various aspects of the contemporary Iranian society. The topics of interest might include, but not limited to:
- Iran and the “new media” in the age of globalization
- The cyber space as the new sphere of political contention
- Women in the Islamic Republic
- Shi’a theocracy and the challenges of globalization and modernity
- Population dynamics and social change
- Iranian Cinema in the Islamic Republic
Topic: The 1967 Watershed: The Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Aftermath of the June War
Organizer: Avi Raz, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
Inquiries: avi.raz@orinst.ox.ac.uk
Contact organizer by: February 10, 2012
I want to organize a panel tentatively entitled “The 1967 Watershed: The Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Aftermath of the June War,” that would examine in the light of the historical records the ways in which the June 1967 War affected, changed or shaped the policies and attitudes of the rival parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
I myself will present a paper on the Israeli approach during the first two years of the postwar era (1967-69). I am looking for two or three panelists to cover some of the following perspectives: Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, American, Soviet, or even the global picture.
Topic: Discourses of Citizenship and Nationality in the Levant, 1918-1960
Organizer: Lauren Banko, Department of History, SOAS, London
Inquiries: lauren.banko@soas.ac.uk
Contact organizer by: 1 February 2012.
The panel will be broadly focused on citizenship and nationality legislation and discourses in the Arab Middle East, from 1918-1960. The panel topic is meant to explore the legislation of these statuses in the era of mandates and colonialism and post-independence. It will explore not only the colonial legislation of citizenship and nationality, but also the counterdiscourses by the indigenous inhabitants themselves of mandated Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan.
Topic: Ottoman Inter-Confessional Dialectics in the 19th and early 20th Centuries
Organizer: Scott Rank, Ph.D. Candidate, Central European University, Department of History
Inquiries: rank_scott@ceu-budapest.edu
Contact organizer by: 1 February 2012.
This panel will explore Ottoman inter-confessional relations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will examine the concepts of official discourses of belief; alternate programs of modernity disputed among (but not limited to) secularists, Muslim intellectuals, non-Muslim leaders, and Protestant missionaries; and contested notions of heterodoxy and orthodoxy. In order to do so it will reject essentialized categories of religious identity created at the state-administrative level that could apply arbitrarily and even incorrectly to the provinces. Instead, it will examine how inter-confessional encounters were not necessarily antagonistic but could have reciprocal effects that produced hybrid identities. Furthermore, it will make use of sources that provide alternate accounts of these encounters, such as writings by local literati, missionary sources, regional administrative accounts of heterodox groups, and European diplomatic sources. It will also consider the influence of environmental factors in shaping confessional identity.
Topic: Remembering the First World War in the Middle East
Organizer: Pheroze Unwalla, Department of History, SOAS, University of London
Inquiries: p_unwalla@soas.ac.uk
Contact organizer by: 5 February 2012.
That the First World War helped create the future of the Middle East is more than a mere tautology; the war is considered by many to be the pivotal episode in the formation of the modern Middle East. Yet, as the centennial of the war approaches, it behooves us to also consider how the nations and peoples of the Middle East have remembered and looked back upon the war. This panel seeks to understand what the First World War has meant to the nations and peoples of the Middle East in retrospect. Paper submissions are requested on any aspects of remembrance of the war in one or more countries of the Middle East or North Africa. Papers may focus on national or grassroots perspectives, public or private spaces, communal or individual recollections, the memorialization of particular events or broader re-imaginings of the past, or any combination therein. The focus of the panel will be refined in response to the nature of the proposals received.