Job Opening: Dean for School of Public Administration and Policy at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

[Logo of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies] [Logo of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies]

Job Opening: Dean for School of Public Administration and Policy at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Hiring Institution: The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI)

Deadline: June 1, 2014. Position to be filled by September 2014.

About the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI), an independent institute for learning and research in the fields of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Public Administration, is being established in Doha, Qatar by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS). It is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2015.

The DI’s mission is to bring together outstanding faculty and graduate students from the Arabic speaking world and beyond for the purpose of carrying out critical studies and research in the fields of: Philosophy, History, Arabic Language and Linguistics, Political Science, Economics of Development, Sociology and Anthropology, Legal Studies, Media Studies, Public Administration, and Public Policy. The DI is comprised of the School of the Social Sciences and Humanities and the School of Public Administration and Policy. Programs will start at the master’s level with the aim of introducing a doctorate program within the following years.

For further information on the DI’s mission, academic priorities, and programs please visit: project.dohainstitute.org.

The DI is currently seeking motivated, exceptional candidates to develop its ambitious and distinctive academic project, and offers an internationally competitive salary and benefits package.

About the School of Public Administration and Policy

The School of Public Administration and Policy aims to provide students with skills, knowledge, and analytical tools in public affairs management, policy making and analysis. Students are enabled to improve the services provided to their communities, and encouraged to consider social phenomena through academic and professional lenses to prepare them to make original and ethical intellectual contributions to the study of societal and governmental behavior.  The School offers a Master`s of Public Administration and a Master`s in Development Policy, in addition to mid-career practical training in the form of diplomas and certificates.

Role

This appointment involves finalizing the preparations for the opening of the DI (by Fall 2015) during the pre-operational academic year (2014-2015).

Reporting to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs, the Dean serves as the chief academic and administrative officer of the School of Public Administration and Policy.

The Dean, as the academic and executive head of the School, is responsible for the academic standards and operations of the school, and specifically for the personnel, curriculum, budgets, and resource management of the school’s programs. 

Key Responsibilities

  • Advise the Provost and the President on all academic matters of the School 
  • Be responsible for the development of the School, particularly with regards to academic programs, curricula, academic personnel, the student body, and physical facilities
  • Lead, plan, and manage the research activities efforts of the School
  • Direct and coordinate activities of the directors and heads of individual programs
  • Chair and participate in the activities and deliberation of the main faculty committees 
  • Develop, revise, and coordinate the assessment of courses, academic programs, program plans, policies, and extracurricular programs for the school

Qualifications and Experience

  • A PhD in an academic discipline represented in the School
  • Holding the rank of professor from an esteemed university with a distinguished record of published research and scholarship in his/her field
  • Demonstrated strategic academic leadership and executive administration at the level of department chair or faculty/school dean in a well-established university with active involvement in graduate studies
  • Excellent interpersonal oral and written communication skills in both English and Arabic
  • Knowledge of managing budgets, resources, policies and procedures, curricular matters and academic personnel issues
  • Excellent track record in planning and managing research

How to apply

Interested and qualified candidates should send their detailed CV and cover letter to careers@dohainstitute.org

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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