Call for Papers: Mobilities and Materialities of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula (Kuwait, 17-19 March 2017)

[Image from official call for papers of the Gulf Studies Symposium (GSS)] [Image from official call for papers of the Gulf Studies Symposium (GSS)]

Call for Papers: Mobilities and Materialities of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula (Kuwait, 17-19 March 2017)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait will hold its third Gulf Studies Symposium (GSS) on 17-19 March 2017. The GSS is a meeting of worldwide Gulf scholars and researchers held biennially in Kuwait. Each symposium is based on a particular scholarly theme that is timely both to the region and to the field of Gulf studies. The theme of the 2017 GSS is "Mobilities and Materialities of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula."

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2017 GSS will bring together international and regional scholars to engage in an interdisciplinary discussion on the movement of people into, out of, across, and within the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in historical and contemporary contexts, and the various material forms that enable, restrict, or are produced by these mobilities.

The Gulf and Arabian Peninsula (incorporating the GCC states, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen) has for centuries been settled, unsettled, and resettled through continuous patterns of migration and the systematic movements of people. Yet the people of this region are commonly fixed within one of two overarching sociological dichotomies: sedentary/Bedouin in relation to the citizenry (particularly before oil), and citizens/expatriates in relation to the overall population (after the advent of state citizenship laws). The two sides of each binary evoke contrasting states of mobility. Historically sedentary groups like villagers or townspeople (hadar) were tied to specific locales, while the Bedouin were nomadic tribes that wandered aimlessly across the region`s deserts. In the citizens/expatriates binary, the former are depicted as settled and permanent, whereas the latter are transient and temporary "guests." In reality, these sociological groups cannot be neatly reduced to such designated states of mobility. Historically, sedentary town-dwellers were extremely mobile: trading and sailing by sea to ports across the Indian Ocean for months at a time, and regularly relocating to towns with more favorable economic or political conditions. Bedouin tribes, meanwhile, were often tied to particular territories (called diras) and inextricably connected to rulers and markets in nearby towns. In present-day contexts, Gulf citizens are also mobile and transnational: they travel several times a year, have second homes elsewhere, study abroad, and so on. And expatriates-though not granted formal citizenship or even, in some cases, permanent residency-often remain in the Gulf for decades if not generations, belying their "temporary" status. Such binaries are not constructed organically out of ostensible facts, but rather are produced, maintained, and reinscribed through overlapping state citizenship, labor, and migration regimes.

This symposium proposes new ways of thinking about the mobilities of diverse groups that go beyond the aforementioned binaries and include subjects previously elided. These may include (but are not limited to): slaves; trafficked and indentured workers; migrant or seasonal laborers; refugees, exiles, and asylees; merchants and traders; urban and real estate developers; artists and architects; militaries and diplomatic figures; students and scholars; travelers and tourists to and from the region; as well as religious figures and pilgrims. Papers may examine the processes that animate or delimit diverse forms of mobility; writings, narratives, and archives that index these mobilities; everyday power relations, governance systems, and geopolitics that configure and are reconfigured by these mobilities; the gendered nature of these mobilities; as well as their broader sociocultural, religious, economic, and environmental implications.

The continuous and systematic movement of people to, from, and within the region creates a mutually-affecting engagement with, and leaves substantial traces in, the material world. The symposium also therefore aims to examine the materialities of these mobilities. This includes the infrastructures, transportation networks/geographies, and various built environments (e.g. cities, military installations, leisure spaces) that enable, constrain, or are produced by people`s movements. It also includes commodities, artworks, monuments, everyday objects, and other forms of material culture that expose (or omit) such mobilities.

INSTRUCTIONS AND DEADLINES:

We encourage scholars to use diverse and innovative methods and conceptual approaches in their work, and to avoid submitting work previously published.

Submissions should be sent by E-mail to Farah Al-Nakib (falnakib@auk.edu.kw) and Geoffrey Martin (mgeoffrey@auk.edu.kw) by 15 October 2016. Please include your name, professional title, and institutional affiliation in the body, and attach your paper title and 400-word abstract as a Word document. Abstracts should relate to the general symposium theme and give some indication of sources, discipline, and methodology. Papers are reviewed blindly by a selection committee.

15 October 2016: Deadline for submissions

15 November 2016: Notification of accepted submissions

1 December 2016: Confirmation of participation

1 March 2017: Submission of full paper for circulation

16 March 2017: Arrival in Kuwait

17-19 March 2017: Symposium

20 March 2017: Departure from Kuwait

The CGS will cover the cost of airfare to and accommodation in Kuwait, as well as most daily meals.

The 2017 GSS was developed in collaboration with the George Washington University`s Institute for Middle East Studies in Washington, DC, as part of a broader project focusing on "Mobilities and Materialities of the Middle East." 

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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