Jadaliyya Turns Three: A Journey's Recap

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Sep 29, 2013
Jadaliyya Turns Three: A Journey's Recap

Jadaliyya Turns Three: A Journey's Recap

By : Jadaliyya Co-Editors

 

This past week, Jadaliyya turned three.

We are not tired. We are exhausted, and have never felt better.

When Bassam first called me [in July 2010] to ask me to join the Jad team he said “oh yeah, it will only take a few of hours of your time.” I did not know he meant per day!

—Lisa Hajjar, Jadaliyya Co-Editor



We look back with amazement at where we were when we first started in the summer of 2010, and how much we have grown since, especially in the past year alone. We expanded in terms of sections/pages, number of languages, team members, readership, citations, social media presence, countries’ accessibility, and classroom use. This summer, our Facebook reach consistently exceeded one million and visitor/downloads activity skyrocketed as a result of our coverage of events in Turkey, Egypt, and, recently, Syria. Our culture and Arabic sections are making their way into the screens of a dramatically increasing number of readers in the region and beyond, and our other eighteen pages keep quite busy.

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[Early Screenshots from Summer 2010, before Jadaliyya became public. We actually wrote/published articles for three months before we launched so readers can be exposed to a thick publication from the get-go. See a sample below.]

Jadaliyya’s Initial Twenty Posts (2 July 2010 to 1 September 2010)

1.    Syria`s Economic Outlook by Bassam Haddad
2.    A Portrait of an Iraqi Person at the End of Time by Sinan Antoon
3.    Fadlallah and Abuzeid Die Within Two Days by Bassam Haddad
4.    More than a stain by Sherene Seikaly
5.    Another Credible Israeli Investigation by Noura Erakat
6.    Anniversary of Salah al-Bitar`s Assassination by Bassam Haddad
7.    An Incredible Finding in Israel`s Investigation of Itself by Noura Erakat
8.    Good News From Iraq by Sinan Antoon
9.    Reich Is No Marxist, But... by Bassam Haddad
10. Arabic Comes to Jadaliyya
11. Al-Tahir Wattar (1936-2010) by Sinan Antoon
12. The Poet Lives by Sinan Antoon
13. The Safety of Objects by Maya Mikdashi
14. Endless Negotiations: Palestinian Quicksand by Noura Erakat
15. To Stay Modern by Sherene Seikaly
16. My Great and Terrible Obsession: Torture by Lisa Hajjar
17. The Politics of Power Cuts In Egypt (Part 1) by Mohammad Waked
18. The Predicament of Independent Opposition in Syria (Part 1) by Bassam Haddad
19. Neoliberalism`s Populist Engine and Race in America by Noura Erakat
20. An Open Invitation to An Occupation Masquerade by Sinan Antoon
  

Quick Recap

During the past three years, we expanded from having one main page to twenty, with an equivalent number of relatively autonomous teams to go along. We have addressed issues from culture to intervention, reviewing books, films, and art exhibits, and chronicling resistance struggles and daily developments across a contested region and time. We added a fabulous Turkey Page with a brand new team of stellar writers, expanding thereby the languages we publish to four—Arabic, English, French, and Turkish. A few more new additions are coming to Jad this fall, including our much-awaited Cities Page on urban studies, space, and more, due to launch next week. Stay tuned.

\"\"[our current Jadaliyya bars/pages]

Speaking of “tuned,” we just launched our first Podcast (Jad for Reel عن جد), in BETA form, waiting to benefit from our listeners/readers’ feedback in order to deliver a state of the art, insightful, and enjoyable monthly program. Our intention is to provide a monthly digest for those who would like a quick recap, plus additional new material/interviews produced for the podcast. “Jad for Reel” is the first installment of future audio-visual programs/podcasts. 

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[Jadaliyya`s first Podcast. CLICK TO PLAY.]

Our Media Roundups for nearly all pages on Jadaliyya deserve a special mention. The fantastic junior team members have been producing weekly roundups of relevant and significant articles in Arabic, English, French, and Turkish. These have become go-to places for readers interested in the respective country or topical pages, and have become an important one-stop-shop for those who missed last week’s news and analysis, on Jadaliyya and beyond. All roundups, and top “10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s,” can be found on our vibrant Roundups page here.

Other exciting pages and initiatives include our Profile page, Photography page, and From the Archives posts. 

More than any other development, our Arabic Section grew tremendously and, at times, outstripped our English section in topping Jadaliyya in terms of readership. We are particularly excited about the increasing number of writers from the region, from Morocco to Bahrain, passing through the Levant and Egypt, who found in Jadaliyya an appropriate and productive forum for their stellar work and analysis. This year, the Arabic section will grow further as it will benefit from an expanded team, and from deeper collaboration with other publications, chief among them being Tadween Publishing’s informative and insightful blog.

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Our team grew from five co-founders (founding story here), to twelve and then seventeen Co-editors, and then shot up to sixty team members working on twenty pages, with overlapping page teams. Jadaliyya page teams are relatively autonomous and set their own agendas with organic consultation with the rest of the teams and the Co-Editors (i.e., such conversations happen naturally because of Jadaliyya’s mode of work and open/continuous communication). We have had our challenges and glitches, but continued to learn and develop our team to create a unique work-mode and solidarity-based organizational experience and development. This formula had its start in 1992 when Jadaliyya’s sister organization, the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal, was born. By 2011, our team exceeded one hundred volunteers, and we found ourselves incapable of maintaining our productivity without funding (see our About page for more). Our main caveat was certainly retaining absolute editorial independence and maintaining our majoritarian volunteer status in terms of all labor conducted, so as not to become dependent on external funds. We plan to continue refining our solidarity-based work-mode and learning from experience in a rapidly changing work-place environment where both technology and censorship are in flux.

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[~33% of Jadaliyya`s Co-Editors during a bedroom meeting at MESA in Washington DC, November 2011]

Moving Forward

We have lots in store for our readers this fall, including the launching of exciting pages that we will refrain from revealing at the moment. Thereafter, we will begin to wind down our page expansion for some time (we parodied ourselves in a post about how Jad keeps creating new pages here).

Pedagogy and Pedagogical Publications

We would like to highlight two future initiatives. First, we intend to begin developing our Pedagogy section to include vast resources for educators and researchers. This will take place through Jadaliyya’s pedagogy page, but, more broadly, through the launching of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) that Tadween Publishing and Jadaliyya are embarking on along with a few other educational institutions/universities. (more information can be found on the nascent project here).

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[The Pedagogical Publication, JadMag. Click to go to www.JadMag.org]

The first outcome of this project is a new kind of series of publications that focus on one particular topic at a time. We are calling this JadMag. The first issue of JadMag is available now, and is titled “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula.” You can access the first issue here. These publications are intended for pedagogical purposes but are quite accessible to the general audience. They include a vast resource section that highlights select books and peer-reviewed articles on the respective topic as well as numerous links to important twitter handles, blogs, websites, organizations, and maps. In order to support educators, a practical Teaching Guide will always accompany JadMag. To take a peek, click here.

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[JadMag`s First Issue on Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula. Click HERE for more to come.]


Collaboration with ASI

The second and related initiative involves deepening collaboration with Jadaliyya’s four sister organizations at the Arab Studies Institute (ASI), including Arab Studies Journal  (peer-reviewed research Journal intended for researchers); Quilting Point (research-based documentary production collective intended for general audiences); Tadween Publishing (a new kind of publishing house intended for educators and the general public); and FAMA (Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, the research arm of ASI, engaging primarily in research on Knowledge Production on the region). MESPI (Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative) is one such avenue. But we intend to develop more collaborative publishing projects with both Tadween and the Arab Studies Journal, and addition audio-visual material with our production collective, Quilting Point.
 

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[Jadaliyya`s sister organizations at the Arab Studies Institute. Click HERE for more information]

Though we are not ready to announce ASI`s mammoth project on Knowledge Production on the Middle East (where Jadaliyya will play a role in dissemination and beyond) , we would like to share a tidbit. This 8-year project will allow for an unprecedented comprehensive and interactive search for both generic research pursposes and, more critically, for the purspose of scrutinizing knowledge production on the region as a politicized process/affair, related as much to power and financing as it is to the desire for the pursuit of knowledge. More, much more, coming in 2014.

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[ASI`s Knowledge Production Project involves Jadaliyya and its sister organizations at the Arab Studies Institute.
Click HERE for more information. We will announce this project shortly.]

We can write/share more but this is long enough (perhaps too long). On our pages henceforth, and across Jadaliyya’s sister organizations, you will see productive developments in the coming year. We are nowhere near done and, frankly, considering the gravity of mainstream discourse on the region, we are going to be around for the long haul, with or without uprisings. So, enjoy the ride!

Finally, we would like to thank each and every one of our readers, including our haters and closet Jad addicts, who have contributed to our development through support, critique, promotion, and constructive feedback. We truly listen and are responsive to what will strengthen and deepen our message/mission. And, clearly, we would not be here had it not been for the increasingly growing pool of stellar writers, from the region and beyond, who have helped us bring near comprehensive coverage and analysis on a broad array of topics and countries. Most of all, we would like to thank the incredibly superb team that runs Jadaliyya, from contributing editors, to researchers, writers, designers, and “interns” who usually end up sticking around and joining the team. Soon, you will see a list of each and every person who joined our team and how they contributed to Jad’s development.

Happy reading and more.

Jadaliyya Co-Editors

[Click here for Arabic]
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Apr 25, 2013 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

The End of an Era: The Less than Grand Opening of the New Ottoman Archives

[The following status update on the new Ottoman Archive Center in Kağıthane was written by Patrick Adamiak, Jeffery Dyer, and Michael Christopher Low.]

For generations, historians of the Ottoman Empire and its former territories in the Balkans and the Arab Middle East participated in a rite of passage linking them to the Ottoman bureaucrats they studied. Going to work at the Ottoman Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) entailed the humbling experience of passing through the famous gates at Bab-ı Ali, or as it came to be known in the West, the Sublime Porte. During Ottoman times, Bab-ı Ali housed the offices of the Grand Vizier and the heart of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Indeed, the term Bab-ı Ali came to be synonymous with the state itself. With their location just steps from Topkapı Palace and the imperial gardens that now make up Gülhane Park, one’s daily commute to the Ottoman archives, housed in a cluster of nineteenth-century buildings just inside the confines of the Sublime Porte, often felt like stepping into the shoes of one’s historical subjects. Naturally, the decision to move Ottoman archival collections to a new location was met with considerable feelings of melancholy and disappointment. Both the archive’s physical location in Sultanahmet, at the heart of Ottoman Istanbul, and the dimly lit confines of the archive’s domed reading room evoked a romantic link to the past, appreciated by Turkish and foreign researchers alike. Alas, Turkey is not a museum to be preserved for the pleasure of the historians who study it. Change is inevitable. And there are, of course, compelling reasons for the construction of modern archival facilities. The buildings of Bab-ı Ali were never intended to accommodate the number of researchers that now utilize the archives each year. Small rooms strained to hold the crush of scholars that gathered during busy summer months and afternoon rushes. The new facilities offer expanded research space and the opportunity to house the documents at an on-site depot, with climate control to protect documents from decay caused by humidity. The site is also purported to include architectural features to protect against natural disasters such as flooding or earthquakes.

For several years the construction of a gigantic new campus located in a suburban setting past the end of the Golden Horn in Kağıthane had been reported. However, the timing of the move remained the stuff of rumor and speculation throughout 2012 and early 2013. Even the archive employees were not completely apprised of the timing of the move until last February. At that time warnings were posted at the archive that the old site would close on 18 March. The uncertainty surrounding the move culminated in frantic weeks leading up to the closure of the old archives. The reading rooms were packed and the staff struggled to keep up with the demand. Doctoral students and professors alike nervously photographed as many documents as possible to avoid wasting their year’s funding. Despite the uncertainty, researchers were assured that access to documents would resume in mid April. As it turns out, that was true, but only partially.

 

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[Reading room at the old Ottoman Archive.  Photo by Michael Christopher Low, 9 March 2013.]

On Monday 22 April the new home to the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Kağıthane was officially opened to the public. We arrived in the morning for the archive’s opening day and were relieved to find out that the facility had indeed opened as promised. The familiar staff from the old archives warmly greeted us as the first researchers to make the trip. However, we quickly learned of some serious issues that we felt researchers should be made aware of before planning their visits over the coming months. The reading room is open for digital document services, providing access to a fraction of the total documents available. However, we were told that the paper documents themselves had not even begun to be moved from the old depot. The employees at the archive were clearly frustrated and embarrassed by this outcome and complained of being left with neither documents to organize nor researchers to serve. As we dug deeper for the staff’s predictions for the resumption of normal service, we were met with extremely pessimistic prognoses. Two months was the most optimistic estimate, but this was offered with a shake of the head and a warning to brace for a wait of as long as six months before normal services were restored. Thus, it is probable that research plans for spring or early summer are essentially ruined. This will likely leave most of the archive’s collection inaccessible perhaps even into the fall, leaving doctoral students and professors scrambling to adjust their research plans and renegotiate fellowships and grants.

As for the facility itself, we were pleasantly surprised. While it is clearly still a work in progress, it is reminiscent of Sabancı University`s campus, with neo-Ottoman rooflines, Islamic architectural sensibilities such as honey-combed shaped muqarnas designs, and multiple levels of grass covered gardens with fountains. One cannot help but note the AK Party’s influence in the promotion of piety throughout the site. New visitors will find prominent prayer rooms in the main entrance hall and first-floor bathrooms, dominated by sleek ablution stations (şadırvan). The entrance hall and new cafe are oppressive and dark, but ultra modern. The ceilings are low, and appear lower because everything is painted black. The cafe is on a mezzanine level overlooking the cavernous conference center, exhibition facilities, and museum. It is a three-story system, with the entrance on the first floor, document room on the second floor, and computer room on the third. The actual researching rooms are well lit and bright in stark contrast to the first level. Both levels have easily two to three times the seating capacity of the old rooms at Bab-ı Ali and reading desks and computers should be in abundant supply. The employees` desk in the reading room stretches across much of one wall, which should relieve some of the crowding that was a familiar sight at the old location. Once the kinks have been worked out, there is much to recommend the archive’s new interior as a functional workspace. 
 

\"\"[Café/Exhibition space and entrance of the new archive center. Photo by Michael Christopher Low, 9 March 2013.]


The campus’s physical location, however, is an unmitigated disaster. The facility overlooks green space surrounding Kağıthane Creek, which is pleasant enough. However, the complex is marooned on the side of a busy four-lane divided road. While there is a bus stop immediately in front of the facility, there are no cross walks to reach the other side. As a result, catching the bus or a taxi (roughly fifteen to twenty Turkish lira from the archive to Şişhane or Galata) on the opposite side of the road entails a harrowing scramble across four lanes of high-speed traffic. Here, we do not wish to be overly alarmist, but for such a high profile facility this lack of planning for pedestrian traffic presents a serious danger. Likewise, there are currently no sidewalks immediately in front of the campus. Thus, while there is a winding ramp for handicap access and multiple elevators inside the campus, making one’s way to and from a city bus would be problematic even for a healthy elderly person. There is a cafeteria on site serving hot meals for five Turkish lira, but there are no restaurants or cafes near the building, nor even space for them to be built because of the location between a steep hill, a highway, and the creek.  

Information about the new site and transportation options for reaching it has been scarce. When planning our first visit, we relied on a map made available by Emily Neumeier (University of Pennsylvania) and Christopher Markiewicz (University of Chicago) on Dissertation Reviews. While there are a number of bus, dolmuş, and ferry options, the Kağıthane campus is not served by the metro system. While we knew that the new location would be inconvenient, its location is in fact even bleaker than we had initially expected. 

While we are certain that the facility will come into its own over the coming years, for now it is hard not to lament the loss of Bab-ı Ali. For veteran researchers the move will be hard to accept. You will be torn from your old haunts and routines. Being an Ottomanist will never be quite the same. And for those who never got the opportunity to work in the old archive, we suspect that it will signal a generational marker putting us just a bit further from our Ottoman subjects. We can only wonder if the freeways and overpasses of Kağıthane will affect how we imagine the Ottoman Empire!