Essential Reading Bouquets: Women & Gender; Migration; Arab Uprisings

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Sep 2, 2019
Essential Reading Bouquets: Women & Gender; Migration; Arab Uprisings

Essential Reading Bouquets: Women & Gender; Migration; Arab Uprisings

By : Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)

[This is a bouquet installment of our Essential Readings (ER) series. Individual ERs provide annotated lists of works on a specific geographic, temporal, and thematic subjects. The bouquet builds on this series by grouping those ERs related to a specific place or topic. In the below, we offer three ER bouquets, one on each of women & gender, migration, and the Arab uprisings. Each bouquet lists and briefly describes the Essential Readings installments it groups. Happy reading!

Women and Gender 


Women's and Gender History by Judith Tucker

Gender and Empire by Wilson Chacko Jacob

Marriage in the Middle East by Jeffery Fitzgibbons

Summary:


The Essential Readings bouquet on the topic of Gender includes three signal compilations from leading scholars in the field. Each Essential Reading acknowledges the political contexts that shaped the scholarship as part and parcel of highlighting the arc of the scholarly field.  Judith Tucker highlights the rapid shifts and developments of the field of Women’s and Gender History, by focusing on five specific facets: women’s movements, gender and nationalism, Islamic law and gender, family history, and sexuality and the body. Wilson Chacko Jacob notes the “newness” of the field of Gender and Empire from just a few decades ago, and compiles resources that extend beyond the study of masculinity and gender to include works on women, colonialism, and homosexuality. In Marriage in the Middle East, Jeffery Fitzgibbons provides an extensive overview of key historical, sociological, legal, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches to the study of marriage, and marital practices, in the region.

Migration


Emigration from the Levant by Stacy Farenthold

Palestinians in Latin America by Marwa Janini

North African France by Paul Silverstein

Migration and the Gulf by Pardis Mahdavi

Summary:


The Essential Readings bouquet on Migration departs from the oft-discussed patterns of migration in the Middle East, instead delving into an overview of migration, emigration, and immigration outside the region, drawing out theoften underserved stories and experiences of migrants in different parts of the globe. In Emigration from the Levant, Stacy Farenthold focuses on scholarship concerning  migration from the Mashriq (the eastern Mediterranean lands under Ottoman sovereignty) to the mahjar (diaspora) in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and the Philippines, from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period. In Palestinians in Latin America, Marwa Janini notes that among the groups of “migrant” Palestinians which include internally displaced persons, refugees in exile, and Palestinians who have emigrated from their homeland to countries outside of the Middle East, this third group is one that is largely under-studied and un-accounted for in discussions of Palestinian national identity. Janini focuses on scholarship that exposes reasons for why this group of Palestinians has been excluded from Palestinian historiography while highlighting their significance as shapers of Palestinians nationalism, Middle East politics, and Latin America. North African France refocuses our attention to Middle Eastern and particularly Maghrebi diasporas in a former colonial power. As Paul Silverstein notes, such a focus “offers a particularly rich case of thriving diasporic communities.” In Migration and the Gulf, Pardis Mahdavi focuses on works on labor, distinguishing this group  from the larger corpus of migration scholarship, in that they“challenge the artificial divide between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ labor/migration.” 

Levantine History


Reading Lebanon by Maya Mikdashi

Hashemite Rule in Jordan by Pete Moore

History of Famine the Modern Middle East by Melanie Tanielian

Levantine Mandates by Michael Provence

Summary:


The Essential Readings on Levantine History bouquet highlights the innovative ways scholars of the Middle East consider the history of a place. One of the first Essential Readings to be published, Maya Mikdashi’s Reading Lebanon offers a broad overview of works from primarily anthropologists and historians, each highlighting central topics in the genesis of modern Lebanon. Alternatively, Pete Moore’s examination of Hashemite Rule challenges simplistic narratives of the rise and survival of the regime in Jordan by bringing together texts that highlight geopolitical, institutional, and socio-economic dynamics behind the monarchy. Melanie Tanielian’s History of Famine in the Modern Middle East grounds conversations around the famine in Greater Syria during WWI within theoretical works on famine as well as a longer history of famine in the region. She asks powerful questions about how we might study historical famines while contending with those occurring now. In Levantine Mandates, Michael Provence details how successive generations of historians have contended with the European colonial division of the Levant; he lauds the important interventions of newer works while reminding readers not to ignore the contributions of older studies. 

The Arab Uprisings 


Uprisings, Resistance, and Popular Mobilization in the Middle East and North Africa by John Chalcraft

Uprisings, Resistance, and Popular Mobilization by Asef Bayat

The Syrian Uprising by Raymond Hinnebusch

Media and the Arab Uprisings by Hatim El-Hibri, Rayya El Zein, and Marwan Kraidy

Summary:


Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, a wave of publications on revolt and revolution in the Middle East have left the presses. The influx was both a blessing and a curse, offering some stunning new contributions, while also flooding the shelves with studies lacking nuance, historical grounding, or theoretical depth. Luckily, we have had a handful of outstanding scholars to help navigate readers through the uneven terrain. John Chalcraft’s Uprisings, Resistance, and Popular Mobilization in the Middle East and North Africa covers insightful case studies and more comparative texts (both sets featuring a range of theoretical frameworks) that ground contemporary discussions. Asef Bayat’s Uprisings, Resistance, and Popular Mobilization focuses on the intertwining theoretical trajectories for thinking about subversion and revolt across the region. Raymond Hinnebusch offers a much-needed account of the state of publications on the specific case of The Syrian Uprising. He breaks down some of the most critical works into disciplinary categories. Finally, Hatim El-Hibri, Rayya El Zein, and Marwan Kraidy’s Media and the Arab Uprisings explores the media landscape of the 2011 uprisings in the context of larger theoretical questions about the mediation of subversion and disobedience. Their list helps rescue the topic from knee-jerk responses that preached forms of techno-exceptionalism to the uprisings.
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Aug 30, 2017 Lebanon
Tadween Editors By :
Tadween Editors

Education in the Time of Virality

Widespread access to the internet has facilitated means of acquiring news and information at rates unseen in earlier eras. As individuals, we have the ability to post and spread political information, social commentary, and other thoughts at will. This has caused an information overload for users of social networking sites. In a fight for views, reposts, and clicks, creators, both corporate and not, have been forced to develop new tactics to inform their audiences. This response to a new mode of information consumption also forces a reconsideration of how we understand knowledge production. Much of the information put forth into the world is absorbed passively, such as through characters’ storylines in books, films, and television - and this information accumulates over a lifetime. What, then, happens when knowledge is actively consumed (as is done when reading, watching, or listening to news stories), but the manner through which the information is presented still conforms to the brevity generally associated with more passive knowledge intake?

Pew Research estimates that over 70% of Americans use their phone to read the news. This is nearly a 25% increase since 2013. The constant barrage of advertisements in online articles does not make consuming news easy to do on a phone, thereby forcing media outlets and their competitors to change and adopt new tactics. Applications such as Flipboard have tried to mitigate these frustrations by simply providing the full article without the ads on their own platform, but many people still turn to sources like The Skimm. In attempting to distill a day’s worth of news coverage on domestic affairs, foreign affairs, pop culture, and sports into a few quips, undeniably both texture and nuance are lost. To compete with these services, CNN, the New York Times, and other mainstream news sources are doing the same and producing articles that give the, “Top 5 News Moments to Start Your Day,” or a, “Daily Brief.” Of course, looking at the language differences between the New York Times daily summary versus The Skimm’s, one can tell which is a more comprehensive news source. Even so, slashing the word count still takes a toll on clearly informing the public. The question then becomes, after quickly skimming through these summaries, are people doing more readings to cover what was lost? Or has “the brief” become the new standard for knowledge production and awareness?

It is more than likely that a significant portion of The Skimm’s subscribers do go on to read the full article linked in the email, but the growing popularity of similarly quick and fast news sources has had an impact on how much information viewers and readers actually understand. Between 2011 and 2014, The Skimm was founded, along with AJ+, Now This, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed News’ more serious journalism section. Undeniably, all of these sources produce and publish very important information, and make this information accessible to a larger audience. However, their production and marketing strategies hinge upon condensing very nuanced topics into videos that are, on average, only seven minutes long, as well as optimizing their materials for social media audiences. Now, it is ridiculous to expect highly textured and complicated issues to be thoroughly represented in these videos or posts. Even research based texts do not touch upon all of the complexities of a topic. The problems arise when looking at how viewers perceive themselves and their level of knowledge after actively searching out the products of, for example, AJ+ and Buzzfeed, for information. Carefully refining their materials to fit the shortened attention span of people scrolling through Facebook, social media news organizations have found their niche audience. Their products provide a simple way to deliver information to those who want gather knowledge on the “hot topics of today,” but do not what to do the leg work to be truly informed. These videos are spread throughout Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in a manner that says, “Watch this, and you will know what is going on in the world.”

Understanding how information is being pushed out into the world is almost as important as the content of the information. None of these outlets claim to provide comprehensive knowledge, but in being popular sites for information, the question becomes: do they have a responsibility to encourage their viewers to continue to inform themselves about these issues? Having a well-informed society is phenomenal, but if in informing society we are also forever altering how we consume knowledge to favor brevity over nuance, what consequences could come with this change? We must ensure that the consumption of these videos does not become a license for people to see themselves as truly informed and thus appropriate for them to take the microphones at protests and speak over those who have a solid and textured understanding of the issues. Information content is incredibly important, as is spreading knowledge, and AJ+, Now This, and the like have become important role models in showing how issues should be accessible to everyone and not clouted in jargon. But we must simultaneously consider the unintended side effects that these styles of videos have on knowledge production. Ultimately, it is a mutual effort. Just as producers must be watchful of their content and method of dissemination, we as consumers must be mindful of how we digest and understand the news we take in.


[This article was published originally Tadween`s Al-Diwan blog by Diwan`s editor, Mekarem Eljamal.]