Call for Papers: CSU Conference on Middle Eastern Studies (October 15-16, 2011)

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Call for Papers: CSU Conference on Middle Eastern Studies (October 15-16, 2011)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Proposals: The 4th Annual CSU Conference On Middle Eastern Studies

October 15-16, 2011 at Cal Poly Pomona

Recent uprisings against autocratic and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and North Africa shattered many myths and stereotypes about Arab and Islamic societies. Led largely by youth, these movements are historic events of momentous significance. A new Middle East is in the making. Whatever the final outcome of these upheavals may be, these developments have local, regional, and global implications.

The 4th Annual CSU Conference on Middle Eastern Studies invites scholars, experts, and graduate and undergraduate students to submit papers and presentations that address and analyze these developments and place them in their historic and present context. The geographic area covered by the conference is inclusive of an expanded Middle East, from Afghanistan to Morocco.

The conference is concerned with the teaching of the Middle East. However, while the focus of the conference is recent developments in the Middle East, papers and presentations on any other area dealing with the modern Middle East will be considered, including the following research topics:

  • Art, Architecture, Visual & Performing Arts
  • History & Historiography
  • Literature, Literary Studies & Linguistics
  • Culture and Society
  • Diaspora & Migration Culture
  • Middle East Politics & Representations
  • U.S. Foreign Policy
  • Media Studies (including Film, Broadcast, Print, News, etc.)
  • Economic development, Sustainability and Democratic transition


Proposals:

Proposals for complete panels will be given priority. However, the conference is also open to individual proposals.

Panel Proposals: Panel proposals should be submitted by a moderator, inviting three to four presenters to discuss a topic relevant to the themes mentioned above. The topic should be one that would benefit from diverse opinions and open discussion. Panel presentations will be limited to 90 minutes.

Paper Proposals: Exploring original research on the Middle East by one or more authors. Presentations will be 20 minutes long.

All submissions should be in MS Word and mailed electronically to:

Professor Mahmood Ibrahim
Program Committee Chair
History Department
Cal Poly Pomona
3801 West Temple Avenue
Pomona, CA 91768
mibrahim@csupomona.edu

Please include the following:

  • Cover Sheet: Required for all submissions. On a separate cover sheet, list the title of the presentation, author name(s), school affiliation(s), contact person address, and audio-visual requirements. Please make a separate cover sheet for each submission.
  • Abstracts: Abstract submissions should be approximately 500 words and must be in English. Abstract and full paper submissions should be sent in MS Word or PDF document format. Please include title but do not include author name(s) or school affiliation(s).

Deadlines:

Deadline for abstracts: Originally June 13, 2011, but has since been waved.

Notifications of acceptances: August 1, 2011

Conference Fees, Registration, and Accommodation:

Participants are expected to complete the registration process before September 1, 2011. Failing to send the registration fees on or before this date might result in excluding the paper from the proceedings. Registration fee is $75 for conference participants and $25 for students. An additional $25 will be charged for late registration. Accommodation is available at Kellogg West Conference Center and Hotel (Tel. +1-909-869-2222).

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412