Call for Papers: Quotidian Youth Cultures in the Gulf Peninsula - Changes and Challenges (3 February, Cambridge)

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Jan 22, 2019 Arabian Peninsula
Kuwaiti youth celebrating Kuwait's independence, 2011. Via Wikimedia Commons. Kuwaiti youth celebrating Kuwait's independence, 2011. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Call for Papers: Quotidian Youth Cultures in the Gulf Peninsula - Changes and Challenges (3 February, Cambridge)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Information:

Workshop Directors


Emanuela Buscemi
University of Monterrey (UDEM)
Mexico
emabuscemi@hotmail.com

Ildiko Kaposi
Gulf University for Science and Technology
Kuwait
Kaposi.I@gust.edu.kw

Abstract


The youth bulge registered in the Middle East in the past decade reveals how youth is becoming a crucial resource in the area. Described in world media primarily in terms of radicalisation or political mobilisation, youth is ambivalently torn between opportunity and challenge. In the Gulf Cooperation Countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE) young people enjoy an extensive welfare system, can access the latest technological advances, live in a globalised culture and display international consumption patterns. However, they have been affected by the drop of oil prices, have been hit by unemployment, and are experiencing challenges in terms of education opportunities and housing availability. Their demands for social and political change display potential instability, as evidenced by the uprisings in the region. Moreover, governments have alternated increased security measures and tighter provisions with ad hoc youth programmes to foster creativity, entrepreneurship, and inclusiveness.  

The workshop intends to interrogate youth cultures in the everyday in the past decade, seeking to contribute to Gulf Studies by complicating and questioning the continuity with the literature; investigating the implications on Khaleeji identity construction and wider social, cultural and political processes; examining from a multi-disciplinary perspective the relationship with dominant narratives in a globalised society; complicating the framework of opposition and resistance. In so doing, the workshop will bring a critical perspective on quotidian youth cultures in the GCC, unpacking the ambiguities and contradictions, and contextualising an under-researched topic.

Description and Rationale


Youth studies as an interdisciplinary field focuses on young people’s cultures and their relationship with society at large (Benasso, Helve, Merico, 2018). Classical contributions like Karl Mannheim’s The Problem of Generations (1952 [1928]) link youth with political cultures of the past, stressing the important role the new generations might have in social and political change as a ‘latent resource’. Moreover, their flexibility allows them to adapt more rapidly to new societal and cultural patterns. Talcott Parsons further investigated youth culture as motivated by opposing forces, namely independence (from the previous generations) and conformity (to peer groups) (1942). Stuart Hall, then, operated an important link between cultural and youth studies, concentrating his scholarship on youth culture and subcultures (Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Traditionally, youth studies have investigated primarily youth in North American and European societies, while youth in the Middle East has attracted a growing sensationalistic interest in terms of terrorism, uprisings and protests, religious extremism, and migration emergencies. The effects of globalization on youth have been addressed by Zygmunt Bauman as a condition of liminal drift (1976), a finding further reiterated by Guy Standing with the notion of precariat (2011) and precariousness, while Linda Herrera and Asef Bayat have addressed Muslim youth challenges and political cultures in the Global South with their seminal work (2010). Last year, Linda Herrera convincingly called for a new engagement of scholars and researchers “as a collective means to better understand the current realities and challenges” facing youth in the Middle East (2017, 37). In a way, the present workshop seeks to take up the challenge to investigate this issue further.

Objectives and Scope


Demographics in the Middle East have shown a substantial population growth at an unprecedented rate in the past 70 years, and have increasingly highlighted the numerical significance of the youth population. In the Arabian Gulf, 60% of the population is below 30 years of age. Numerically significant and occupying an ambivalent social position, youth poses challenges to traditional Gulf societies. Official rhetoric recognises youth as the future of these countries and invests young people with great hopes of carrying on the Gulf way of life into the future. Gulf governments, thus, have increasingly promoted youth initiatives and creativity, like the Emirates Foundation Award for Arabian Gulf Youth or the Kuwaiti Youth Project. At the same time, the technologically savvy better than ever before-educated, globally connected youth bulge presents problems and shows signs of a potential for instability in the demands for social and political change, as illustrated vividly in the course of the Arab Spring events. The fluctuation in oil prices in the past decade challenges the extensive paternalistic welfare systems put in place in these countries, evidenced by housing shortages, unemployment, education challenges, lack of direct political representation, gender divides, social and political exclusion. Demographic age group markers aside, however, Gulf Arab youth are far from constituting a homogeneous population. Youth cannot be disjointed from their socio-economic and ethnic background, their sectarian affiliation, gender and sexual orientation. In political terms, such diversity is expressed in the way demands for reform can favour liberalisation or Islamisation, greater inclusiveness and tolerance or radicalisation and (re)tribalisation.

There is a need for a deeper understanding of Gulf youth beyond the much-discussed protests inspired by the Arab Spring, or momentous events that that are given great visibility in world media. Such deeper understanding can emerge from studying the quotidian lives and struggles, opportunities and contributions of youth who, in the process of developing their personal identities, are also actively contributing to the construction of a renewed Khaleeji identity. It is in the domain of everyday life that social relations are given routine expression and youth identities are shaped and negotiated. Focusing on the everyday, moreover, makes possible the exploration of micro-changes that are incrementally shaping relations in Gulf societies. By studying the quotidian, thus, larger social, political and cultural issues are brought into focus and can be explored from new perspectives.

The aim of the present workshop is to provide a comprehensive overview of the shifts that have occurred in youth cultures and youth identities in the past decade in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE). We aim at analysing the implications of quotidian practices and formations in the framework of growing social, cultural and political transformations.

Contribution to Gulf Studies


The proposed workshop builds upon and contributes to youth studies in the Middle East (Herrera and Bayat, 2010; Bennani-Chraïbi and Farag, 2007; Bonnefoy and Catusse, 2013). In line with this literature, we interrogate the formations and manifestations of youth cultures in the everyday GCC countries, focusing on the developments and evolution of youth studies in the Middle East in the last decade.

In particular, we seek to:

  1. Assess and complicate the continuity with classical theories while focusing on a specific geographical area, the GCC countries, in the past decade. Postcolonial and decolonial frameworks of analysis will contribute to a broader understanding of youth quotidian cultures.
  2. Investigate the implications of youth cultures and quotidian practices in the GCC on identity construction and wider social, cultural and political processes. Our goal is also to expand these themes beyond the reach of the Arabian Peninsula. With a few exceptions, the topic remains largely under-researched.
  3. By employing a holistic perspective to youth quotidian cultures in the GCC, the workshop opens up the thematic field to a multi-disciplinary approach, interrogating the ways youth identities and cultures conform and confront dominant narratives in a globalised society.
  4. Focusing our thematic workshop on research developments and debates occurred in the past decade, we intend to examine quotidian youth cultures in post-contention societies, complicating the framework of opposition and resistance. In so doing, the workshop will contribute to unpacking the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding youth and youth cultures in contemporary GCC countries.

The workshop directors intend to foster dialogue and discussion on the thematic issues, contributing to the field of Gulf Studies with the publication of an edited volume.

Anticipated Participants


The workshop is intended to attract a variety of papers from the social sciences and humanities from a wide range of topics relating to youth in the Gulf. Research works based on fieldwork in the area are particularly encouraged. Topics examining youth cultures and identities in the past decade, include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • youth cultures and subcultures
  • processes of Khaleeji identity construction
  • socialisation processes and new socialities
  • youth and social media
  • participation, online (and offline) activism
  • youth and civil society in the post-Arab Spring era
  • youth and migration, nationals and non-nationals
  • gender and youth
  • family formation and divorce
  • youth, identity and nation-building prerogatives
  • demographics and economic challenges
  • the right to the city and the built environment
  • leisure and consumption
  • youth and religion
  • youth and disability
  • challenges of education

We welcome qualitative and quantitative papers focusing on GCC countries, both as country-specific studies or in comparative perspective. Moreover, we seek to include theoretical contributions and practitioners’ experiences on the topic.

Workshop Directors’ Profiles


Emanuela Buscemi teaches at the University of Monterrey (Mexico). She holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She is affiliated as a research associate with CEFAS, Kuwait. She taught at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) and was a research fellow at the Center for Gulf Studies in the same institution. Her research interests include social movement theories, informal political activism and resistance, youth, gender and identity politics, narratives of communities and belonging, political transitions. Her geographical focuses are the Gulf countries and Latin America. Her publications have appeared in AG About Gender-International Journal of Gender Studies, Contemporary Social Science-Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (forthcoming), and in edited volumes (New York University Press, in print).

Ildiko Kaposi is a social scientist whose work focuses on issues of democracy from the perspective of media and communication. She holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from Central European University, Budapest. She has studied the roles of the press and Internet in fostering participation in emerging or transitioning democracies in post-communist Europe and the Middle East. Employing mainly qualitative but also quantitative methods she specializes in in-depth explorations of the intersections of democratic principles and their interpretations in specific social, legal, political, and cultural contexts. She has nine years of teaching experience at private universities in Kuwait. Currently she is Assistant Professor at the Mass Communication and Media department of the Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait. Her most recent publication is the co-authored book Media Law in Kuwait (2018).

Selected Readings


Bayat, A & Herrera, L. (2010). Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Wiley, 2004

Benasso, S., Helve, H., Merico, M. (2018). Between Cultures and Transitions: Gender Perspectives in Youth Studies, AG About Gender, International Journal of Gender Studies, 13(7): I-XXIV.

Bennani-Chraïbi, M. & Farag, I. (Eds). (2007). Jeunesses des sociétés arabes. Par delà les promesses et les menaces [Youth in Arab Societies : Beyond Promises and Threats]. Paris: Au lieux d’être.

Bennett, A. (2017), Youth Cultures, London, Sage.


Berger, B.M. (1963), “On the Youthfulness of Youth Cultures”, in Manning, P.K. and Truzzi M. (eds. by), Youth and Sociology, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, pp. 52- 68.


Bonnefoy, L. & Catusse, M. (Eds). (2013). Jeunesses arabes. Du Maroc au Yémen: loisirs, cultures et politiques [Arab Youth. From Morocco to Yemen: Leisure Time, Cultures and Politics] Paris: La Découverte.

Buscemi, E. (2017). Resistant identities: culture and politics among Kuwaiti youth, Contemporary Social Science - Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, vol. 12, issue 3-4, special issue “Investigating Youth in Challenging and Troubled Contexts”, pp.258-271.

Côté, J. (2014), Youth Studies. Fundamental Issues and Debates, New York, Palgrave.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (Rendall S. Trans). Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Diwan, K. S. (2014). “Breaking Taboos: Youth Activism in Gulf States”. Atlantic Council Issue Brief. Available at:

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/issue-briefs/breaking-taboos-youth-activism-in-the-gulf-states

Herrera, L. (2017). It’s Time to Talk About Youth in the Middle East as The Precariat. META-Middle East Topics and Arguments, no. 9, pp. 35-44.

Hall, S., Jefferson, T. (eds.). (1976), Resistance through Rituals. Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London, Routledge.

Janmohamad, S. (2016) Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World. London: I.B. Tauris.

Jones, G. (2009). Youth, Cambridge, Polity.


Kaposi, I. (2014). The Culture and Politics of Internet Use Among Young People in Kuwait. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 8(3). Available at:

https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4318/3368

Le Renard, A. (2014). A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power and Reform in Saudi Arabia, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of Generations, in P. Kecskemeti (ed.), Karl Mannheim: Essays, London: Routledge, pp. 276-322.

Masud, M., Salvatore, A., van Bruinessen, M. (2009). Islam and Modernity. Key Issues and Debates. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Parsons, T. (1942), Age and sex in the social structure of the United States, American Sociological Review, 7(5), pp. 604-616.


UNDP, The Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality. Available at:

http://www.arab-hdr.org/reports/2016/english/AHDR2016En.pdf

Wheeler, D. (2017). Digital Resistance in the Middle East: New Media Activism in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Woodman, D. and Bennet, A. (2015), “Cultures, Transitions and Generations: The case for a new youth studies”, in Woodman, D. and Bennet, A. (eds. by), Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations Bridging the Gap in Youth Research, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-15.


Wyn, Johanna, White, Rob, Rethinking Youth, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 1997.
Tags

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”
Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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