Call for Papers: The Global Middle East in the Age of Speed

[The Stunt Biker by Walid Rashid. Copyright by permission of photographer, www.walidrashid.com] [The Stunt Biker by Walid Rashid. Copyright by permission of photographer, www.walidrashid.com]

Call for Papers: The Global Middle East in the Age of Speed

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Papers: The Global Middle East in the Age of Speed

Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham (UK)

2-3 June 2016

Keynote Speaker: Nile Green (UCLA)

Over the past century, motorised vehicles and the new kinds of mobility they enabled gave birth to a radically new social, cultural and political experience. They worked to refashion built environments through urban planning and landscapes through infrastructure programmes, and they altered conceptions of time and the production and experience of space. Whether people took the wheel, loitered at the curb, hitched a lift or crossed the road, automobiles and other kinds of motorised vehicles worked to transform notions of class and gender, of identity and otherness, of inclusion and exclusion. (Auto)mobility, as Nile Green and others have shown, also refigured domestic, regional and international travel in contexts such as pilgrimage or tourism. Meanwhile, national road networks functioned implicitly to produce ‘national’ spaces and explicitly to facilitate state control. Urban roads reshaped the texture of cities dividing inner cities (which often became symbolic ‘heritage’ sites and objects of neoliberal gentrification) from pericentral areas of varied vintage, (often seen as either exclusive gated communities or “problem” areas and laboratories of dissent).

The study of (auto)mobility in western countries and in selected non-western contexts has recently given rise to a flourishing field led by scholars including Mimi Sheller and Cotten Seiler, as influential master narratives - of the expansion of (auto)-mobility from Western genesis to global diffusion – yield to an emphasis on the interplay of empire, capitalism and expertise in an interconnected global carscape. But with a few notable exceptions this new field is less well developed in the context of the Middle East. This two-day conference at the University of Birmingham aims to redress the balance by bringing together both established and emerging scholars working on automobiles and other motorised vehicles, and the kind of mobilities and constructions of space they enable (or, conversely, preclude) in the Middle East. We hope to bring into conversation scholars from a variety of disciplines, notably historians, social scientists, and urban planners, working on local, regional or global issues, but to place the Middle East at its centre.

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We encourage papers/submissions that address the following issues, either historically or from a contemporary perspective: 

  • Histories of the automobile from above and below, including car-based urban planning and infrastructure whether in imperial and national contexts; its uses and effects, such as the reshaping of notions of gender, class, domesticity and national community & economy. Attention to the gradations and specificities of space going beyond the urban-rural binary are especially welcome, as are studies of trans-regional and long distance networks and spatial imaginaries.
  • The impact of Fordist ideologies, production and consumption practices, and infrastructures of automobility in the Middle East in the twentieth century.
  • Studies that connect anthropological or historical study of (auto)-mobility with histories of migratory mobility, forced displacement and global diaspora formation.
  • The intellectual and environmental history of (auto)-mobility`s regulatory and scientific framing in the Middle East, from the rise of impact biomechanics, traffic engineering and environmental politics, to the rhetorics and hierarchies of risk.
  • Social, intellectual and political histories of modernization theory’s characteristic dualism of static indigenous archaism and mobile colonial modernity, and of the racialized, gendered and class-based forms of violence it promoted.
  • Non-vehicle based forms of urban mobility that co-exist within the framework of vehicular mobilities: walking, loitering, strolling and the varied and continuing role of animals in the age of speed.
  • Subversive and coercive mobilities: joyriding in cars, motorcycles, trucks or else practices of congregation in spaces designated exclusively for traffic flow; conversely, motorized counter-insurgency, data-gathering and surveillance systems focused on (auto)-mobility in authoritarian political and/or legislative orders.
  • Public transport histories across the colonial to contemporary period, accounting for the imperatives of planners and for social practice developed from below. Relatedly, social and cultural studies of transient urban spaces: public transport as a liminal zone that facilitates social encounters, and the attendant political economies of labour for groups such as drivers, hauliers, mechanics and retrofitters, delivery workers, or gas station attendants.
  • (Auto)-mobility and the production of social time: traffic jams, parking lots, garages and other non-spaces.
  • Histories of energy and hydrocarbons elaborated in systematic dialogue with studies of (auto)-mobility and the car system.

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The Institute of Advanced Studies is able to fund accepted participants` return economy travel from their home institution, accommodation and meal expenses.

Speakers will be asked to pre-circulate their paper, and we plan to publish a selection of papers in the wake of the conference.

Please contact the lead organiser, Dr. Simon Jackson (S.Jackson.1@bham.ac.uk) should you have further questions.

300 word proposals and a 1 page CV should be sent to Sarah Jeffery (S.Jeffery@bham.ac.uk) by 1 March 2016 and accepted participants will be notified shortly thereafter.

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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