'MESPI Talks': A Conversation with Katy Whiting of the Sijal Institute on Arabic Education in Amman

'MESPI Talks': A Conversation with Katy Whiting of the Sijal Institute on Arabic Education in Amman

By : Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts

In the first of a series of interviews that aims to profile the newest and noteworthy academic institutions in the MENA region that are helping to advance critical learning, Jonathan Adler of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative interviews Katy Whiting of the Sijal Institute. The Sijal Institute is an intensive language and cultural school and institute in the Jabal Amman neighborhood of Amman, Jordan. Whiting discusses the Sijal Institute's efforts to fill gaps in Arabic language instruction, develop new pedagogical strategies, and design more effective cultural immersion programs. 

Transcript


Jonathan Adler (JA):
My name is Jonathan Adler and this episode is the first in a series of institutional profiles brought to you by the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). In this series, we’ll highlight some of the newest and most noteworthy academic institutions in the region that are helping to advance critical learning in Middle East studies. I’m speaking today with Katy Whiting, the managing director of the Sijal Institute in Amman. Sijal is an Arabic language school and cultural hub in the historic Jabal Amman neighborhood of the Jordanian capital. And full disclosure for our listeners, I attended Sijal as a student for the second half of 2018, so this interview may be colored by my memories of the many happy months that I spent at the school. So, Katy, welcome! I’m very excited to speak with you today.

Katy Whiting (KW): Thank you so much Jonathan! I’m excited to be here.

JA: I thought we’d start, for those listeners who may be unfamiliar with Sijal and its program, by asking you to give a general introduction to the school and its programs.

KW: The Sijal institute is an Arabic language school and an academic institute where we provide intensive Arabic instruction at all linguistic levels as well as academic offerings including seminars, lectures, public workshops, things of that sort.

JA: Can you talk a little bit about the background of the school and perhaps in its founding what were the gaps in Arabic language education that it tried to fill?

KW: The main idea behind establishing Sijal was to couple language instruction with cultural immersion and critical engagement with issues in the region; whether political or social. And we felt like students of Arabic came to Jordan often to learn Arabic, but they had a very bubble kind of experience. They weren’t necessarily critically engaging with issues that are happening around them. So, we were trying to bridge that gap with having rigorous academic study  as well as having a high-quality language coursework. So, we’ve been open since 2015 and we have been steadily growing in the Jabal Amman area ever since.

JA: Could you talk a little bit more about some of the concrete strategies that Sijal uses to try to bridge that gap between language learning and cultural immersion? Is there a particular pedagogical philosophy that you’ve helped to develop or that the school has developed that informs the ethos of the school? And this could be anywhere from the material that teachers use, and students engage with in class to the choice of speakers lecture speakers or extracurricular trips.

KW: All of those are very much in the core vision. If we start with the idea of integration, you find a lot of students who will come and they will only be interacting and engaging with students from their said program. So, what we try to do is make students feel as if they’re part of the city by encouraging and setting up internships, volunteer opportunities, language partners. And we also have a pretty rich cultural events calendar so we’ll have speakers who are engaged with issues coming from Jordan, coming from surrounding countries, who are able to offer a critical lens. We have the same idea with the trips in that they’re meant to be academic in their fundamental vision. So we take people to sites not with a touristic lens, but an academic lens of where they’re going and are aiming to interact with the local community, hear more of the local community’s stories, learn more not just about the site itself but about the people who are connected to the site and the people who have lived in the site. Finally, as well, the content, as you mentioned, the content of the coursework. It’s always really important to be constantly reviewing and changing the curriculum to make sure that it’s critical, that it’s academic, that it’s using news sources, that it’s using sources that are engaging. Especially at the intermediate and advanced levels, you find that students have content that is directly relevant to their studies and to their interests. We’ll be taking from literature that is changing the field today; taking from newspapers, magazines, form Jadaliyya, from Al Hudood, from 7iber, from a lot of the cutting-edge places that are doing really strong journalistic work in Jordan and in the broader region. And we’re making sure students are engaging with and grappling with these materials. And honestly even at the elementary levels, we worked for the last year on developing our own Amiyyah curriculum, our own Jordanian colloquial Arabic curriculum which put the cultural elements of the language and the history of the language at the forefront. So students are not just memorizing lists of “these are all of the fruits!” They are actively out in the area talking to people and meeting people and learning about the cultural dimension of the language.

JA: And on this note of one thing I always think about when I reflect on my own language learning journey is the constantly changing regional dynamics. So the fact that perhaps if I had been born five or ten years earlier and taken the same path then I may have seriously considered also studying in Damascus or Cairo or other places in the region—and in fact I remember much of the colloquial material that I learned in my first year of undergraduate Arabic seemed to have been designed for students planning to travel to Syria or Egypt even though at that time none of my peers did or could have. So, on that note could you talk about how Sijal and perhaps studying Arabic in Jordan and Amman in general allows students to attain not just a perspective on Jordanian life and politics and culture but perhaps also a broader regional perspective, particularly now as geopolitical realities prevent or make difficult for students to learn Arabic in other Middle Eastern capitals?

KW: That’s sort of the lived reality of being in Amman right now. The region has quite a lot of changes and conflicts that are happening. Honestly Amman’s history has very much, since the beginning of the building of the city, been shaped by refugee communities and by conflicts in other areas. It’s in the genetic makeup of Amman as a capital and as a city and it very much affects our work. Right now, you have a really large Syrian refugee population, Yemeni refugee population, still, Palestinian, Iraqi refugees, you’ve got people from all over which affects Amman at all levels. In terms of Arabic language studies, the effect on it pales in comparison to the effects of these conflicts on other aspects of life. But in general, it has changed the countries that people are comfortable going to and it changes the dialects that people are interested in learning. If you look population-wise, it makes so much more sense for students to be studying Syrian Arabic Egyptian Arabic. But in terms of what is available and strategic to people’s personal interests, Jordan has seen a really big difference over the past couple of years in terms of what students are coming and when students of coming and what students are interested in studying as well.

JA: And I reflect on my own time there, being in Amman for me seemed not only to be an introduction to Jordanian life but even more so an immersion into Palestinian culture and history - at Sijal but also in terms of the events going on around Sijal.

KW: It is so intimately intertwined with Palestinian history; they are the same. Palestinian history and Jordanian history can’t be separated and, what, 60% of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian background. So, we try very much within our instruction, within our curriculum, to talk heavily about Palestinian history, to talk about Palestinian issues. So, in the Summers we have a content course focusing on Palestinian history, we almost always have speakers talking about Palestinian affairs in every semester, coursework readings that talk about it as well as an educational tour of a Palestinian refugee camp most semesters. And those we don’t take lightly; we take very sensitively. Because it’s always very important for students to understand that this is an educational tour. This is a tour for people to learn more about the initiatives that Palestinian refugees have taken, to learn more about the history and gain experiences with said people. It’s not poverty tourism, it’s not people coming in and taking pictures. It’s about creating conversations with people who wouldn’t necessarily have an opportunity to meet otherwise.

JA: One other question, also reflecting on my time in Amman, one of my favorite parts of coming to Sijal every day was being in this space. Especially, I spent a lot of time in the garden behind the first house studying and enjoying the sounds across the city. So, I was wondering if you could talk about both Sijal houses, but particularly about the first one and its history and perhaps also what you think is the value of learning in this kind of rich historical environment.

KW: The Sijal house is a historic building, it dates back to the era of the British Mandate when Jordan was known as the Emirates of Transjordan. It was built by a Syrian family that had settled in Amman as part of the first waves of merchants that had arrived from Damascus. And you can see so many of the Damascene influences in the architecture of the house itself. There are fountains in the garden, original tiles, and we worked really hard to preserve this original character. We wanted this space to be inspiring for teaching and learning and we wanted it to retain its authentic character. We thought a lot about the furniture, the artwork, we wanted it to reflect contemporary artistic production in Jordan while still retaining the original structure of the building. So, when we first moved into the house in 2014 it was a really dismal space. It basically needed a complete overhaul, even some of the tiles weren’t visible at that time. We pulled flooring up and things like that. But the focus wasn’t in any way on gutting the building, it was in preserving the fundamental elements of it. So, we originally opened in Sijal House which is right across the street from the famous Books@Cafe on the end of Rainbow Street. And as we grew, our student populations grew with us, we expanded to another building across the street. So, both buildings we’ve tried to cultivate beautiful gardens in, especially gardens that have edible components to them; olive trees and pomegranate trees and lemon trees and herb gardens. And we’re proud of the outcome. I feel as if the historical air of the buildings themselves lend very much to students being in that cultural environment further. Especially being in Jabal Amman, the location of the homes is also historically a very important part of Amman. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods and has so many other cultural and artistic institutions that we’re very much able to benefit from our relationships with.

JA: Another thing I wanted to talk about was to give you some time to talk about how the program has grown and changed. And I know that Sijal is still relatively young, but I know that there are a lot of new programs, new initiatives, and new partnerships in Jordan and outside. So perhaps if you could talk a little about those as well as any obstacles or challenges that you have had to confront as part of this developmental process.

KW: I remember when I first started working at Sijal we had seven students and three classrooms. And I remember at the time I was very much thinking “how are ways that we’re going to build the programs?” And I remember having to be so strategic on social media to try and not show that we only had seven students at all of the events. And since then, humdAllah, we’ve experienced quite a lot of growth, it’s no longer seven students per semester. We’ve had faculty led programs this last year with Northeastern University, University of Houston, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, as well as Lincoln High School (which was an interesting experience) in addition to our core programs. So, it’s just been running to keep up. We’re always trying to think about how we can preserve that family environment, that small environment where everyone has individual attention, the teachers and the students know each other very well, the students know each other very well and there’s that sort of deep bond with every cohort which is harder to do especially in the Summer months when we have more programs coming in. But I think that we’ve been able to keep up pace. All of our growth has been very organic; people talking to each other, recommending the program to each other. So, it’s been really a joy, honestly, to see the growth of the programs. And we’re always looking for new ways to grow and to develop. We recently hired on Dr. Sanabel Alfar in a new role where we’re focusing more on developing Arabic coursework for the Jordanian population as well. Developing new seminars to be offered in Arabic, developing new workshops and lectures as well as courses, teaching the Arabic language to native speakers. People who might feel as though their skills in Arabic need some fixing up. It’s been inspiring and it’s been interesting to let the growth lead us more than trying to pursue a particular path.

JA: Is there anything else you’d like to add? This had been really a fantastic discussion so far.

KW: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you! I can go on forever about these topics. I love thinking about curriculum, I love thinking about how the curriculum itself really shapes the way students interact with the country and with the people that they meet. And I think that those questions are questions that are always important to keep in your mind. If you’re hoping to teach in a critical manner and to really guide students to be critical learners. So, these are important questions that we’re always keeping in mind and we’re always so inspired to see the work that’s going on that’s coming up around us in Amman. There’s so much movement and so many interesting initiatives that are happening right now in Amman. So it’s really interesting to be here in this time, to be a part of that, to work with people, to provide a space for people to really showcase a lot of their work. There’s so much going on that we really do want to use our space to amplify these voices. 

Katy Whiting


Katy Whiting
is the Managing Director of the Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture in Amman, Jordan. She has extensive experience teaching Arabic and developing curricular materials at the K-12 and collegiate levels. She holds a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, where she specialized in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language and Curriculum Design.

Jonathan Adler


Jonathan Adler
graduated from Yale University in December 2017. He is the Managing Editor of Tadween Publishing and a contributor to Jadaliyya E-Zine. Jonathan is also the Engaging Books and Pedagogy JadMag Editor at the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). His work has been published in Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England and the North Carolina Historical Review.

 





For more from Status/الوضع, visit www.statushour.com and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts!

The Chronicle of Higher Education Interviews Jadaliyya Co-Founder Bassam Haddad

The following interview was conducted by Ursula Lindsey with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad in preparation for a feature about Jadaliyya for The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature was published on 29 September 2014 and can be accessed by clicking here.

Ursula Lindsey (UL): Could you send me any statistics on the readership of Jadaliyya? I would like to get a sense of the overall size of the readership, and how it is geographically distributed.

Bassam Haddad (BH): We have become much less interested in numbers after having passed an important threshold in 2013, but we do not totally ignore them! Unfortunately (because one would like to see an alternative), the best indicator of the growth and expansion of readership has been “Facebook Reach,” which increased from around fifty thousand per week during the first six months in 2010–2011, to one million in 2012–2013, and surpassed 2.3 million in 2014. We actually stopped monitoring such numbers as closely, but know that our social media and classroom presence continues to increase steadily as our Facebook followers have surpassed 130,000. These followers are pretty active in circulating our content, and constitute a large part of how Jadaliyya content is disseminated. Twitter is another indicator. However, we refrain from tweeting too much, as shown by our tweets-to-followers ratio—which is perhaps among the highest (9900 tweets and twenty-seven thousand followers), at about thirty percent. The closest we have seen in our field is about forty-five to fifty percent. This reflects the extent to which each post/article, and/or tweet, is generating interest. It is important to note that our Arabic reading audience, world-wide but mainly in the region itself, has quadrupled since 2011, and now constitutes almost thirty to thirty-five percent of our readership, a testimony to how local informed readers elect to turn to Jadaliyya frequently—largely because our writers on local matters are either writing from the region or are intimately connected with the region.

As to other forms of tracing numbers, such as unique visitors, they seem quite inconsistent because the extent to which Jadaliyya is read not only via Android, iPhone, and iPad apps, but also because of the unusually large level of circulation of PDFs via huge email lists (which we are on and we see!) and, most importantly, its ubiquitous presence on syllabi (for instance, our unique visitors to the site hover around 500,000 a month, while most read Jadaliyya off line via email, PDF, or apps). Our Middle East scholars/educators/researchers list, now combined with that of Tadween Publishing, our sister organization, tops eight thousand engaged Jadaliyya readers who are increasingly assigning material from Jadaliyya.

The reason this happens is not only because we have good content. There is plenty good content if one searches the net carefully. Rather, it because of four very specific reasons: first, our good content has a long shelf-life, an outcome that is built into the editorial process; second, Jadaliyya content serves as an explicit resource or reference, through twelve topical and country/region-specific Media Roundups, profiles and archival posts for reference use, as well as weekly pedagogical reviews of new books, films, documentaries, art exhibits, and relevant social media items; third, Jadaliyya, in conjunction with Tadween’s blog, has become the space that most educators/researchers constantly visit for matters related to academic freedom, publishing, and higher education in the region as well as the United States and Europe; finally, our Jadaliyya content is selectively tapped to produce books and pedagogical publications that are published by Tadween Publishing and other publishers like Palgrave and Pluto Press, giving more gravity, and more longevity, to Jadaliyya content. One important source of such readers is JADMAG, of which we have so far produced five issues geared to educators, and chock-full of resources that are compiled and categorized at the end of each issue. (see www.JadMag.org or www.TadweenPublishing.com for more information). 

This source of readership is constantly expanding as Jadaliyya seems to be the only available site for such content (now quadro-lingual), and is our litmus test and what keeps us on our toes from day to day. The reason we emphasize this source in relation to numbers and quality is because the population of students reading Jadaliyya material based on educators’ choices is increasing exponentially at times, and serves as our most consistent source of readership with time especially that newcomers from that sphere become loyal readers. 

It is no surprise that the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) consistently sends us their critical public letters to publish when they want to reach the broader academic and research/journalist communities, including beyond the United States. It is not something you see consistently on any other website. And this applies to various other organizations that would like to reach the same expansive cohort (based in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East), including the new Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS).

Our colleague and professor of Arabic literature at Brown University, Elias Muhanna, who also runs his own popular blog, Qifa Nabki, commented openly at a conference that he does not know a professor teaching the modern Middle East who does not have a variety of Jadaliyya articles on their syllabi—an honor that ranges from rare to unique when it comes to similar online publications. 

UL: We discussed stories that caused particularly strong debates, and you mentioned the critique of DAM`s video. Are there any other pieces that sparked debates?    

BH: Just to clarify, this last piece sparked more than a debate, as some folks where actually unhappy with the approach—though we are still in good communication with the concerned parties (e.g., DAM) given our approach to the matter. The pieces that sparked debate, discussion, and the like are actually many, and I am not sure it would be fair to single out a handful. However, the notable pieces that drew heated debates and attention revolve around the July coup in Egypt, or around the nature of the Syrian uprising. But this is almost a continuous variable, and still sparks heated discussions that reflect the polarization on these matters among concerned publics. Nonetheless, we continue to get serious engagement—even if sometimes a bit over the top—from detractors on various topics, from Palestine and Syria, to articles on sexuality, Islam, and even literature and film. The fact that detractors of the entire publication continue to engage and critique reveals a sense of legitimacy that even this cohort associate with Jadaliyya. For a critical publication, this is priceless, and we think we will fail if we do not maintain that level of quality and legitimacy.

UL: What are the most common criticisms or suggestions for improvement your get? Do you think they are valid? Where do you see room for improvement? When I last saw Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon in Cairo, he said, for example, he thought the site might publish less so as to focus more on the quality of the writing. 

BH: Oh, dear, there are all kinds, and so many of which come from us, the editors, given that various page teams are relatively autonomous. Our position on critique is simple: we ignore any critique at our own peril. This does not mean that all criticisms are equally valid. They are not. It does, however, mean that we take them seriously and assume their validity until we can illustrate otherwise to ourselves and to others. In most instances, critiques do include a modicum of validity, and our responsiveness to nearly every single significant line of critiques (based on a compilation) is the reason we keep growing in quality and numbers. We surely miss some, and we surely make mistakes even in assessing critiques—but these represent a minority of cases within our practice. Based on what we have heard, we see room for improvement in soliciting even more writing from the region; in working harder to get more pieces from the scene, on intractably controversial matters, like Syria; and we agree that we, like any successful publication, can get too comfortable with its status quo of readership and contributors. But questions like yours, and internal discussions based on similar observations, push us on a quarterly basis to make a deliberate and explicit effort to reach out. This is in fact why we dramatically expanded the Arabic section (in terms of readership and contributors) during the past two years. 

All in all we operate on a five-year plan of sorts (despite the problematic association with five-year plans). At this point, as we are still in our fourth year, we are establishing ourselves as a serious and perhaps the go-to publication for informed readership. But you will soon see some changes that will expand our scope and spice things up a bit in a productive direction, at a time when we need not worry as much about the basics and daily operations. Our challenge, actually, is to maintain the essentially voluntary-based nature of Jadaliyya. Therefore, much of what we have focused on during the first years of establishment involves building the best team there is, or what we think is such, under these circumstances. It is a continuing challenge, but it has been working since 1992 when the parent organization, the Arab Studies Journal, started.

As to the question of quantity verses quality, we exercise a mean purge every quarter, precisely to avoid the false impression that quantity is synonymous with quality. Surely, we fail here and there. However, the one development since 2013 has been the reduction of the output rate—which we view as having been somewhat unavoidable as this is how you connect with new readership and contributors in the early stages—from about 175 pieces per month to about 110-120 (though this includes all posts and reports, etc.). But this challenge continues, and—frankly—we hold ourselves to standards that are not observed in comparable publications that either focus on one country, or one approach (e.g., Foreign Policy), or one audience, or one language, or one discipline, etc. So we have to make up our own standards for a new kind of publication. All this takes time, and we welcome any criticism that allows us to meat our challenge. We are not sensitive to productive critique at all! We will fail without it. 

UL: You mention detractors of the site—any examples?

BH: Every new initiative gives rise to critics, and that is a good thing. What is interesting about Jadaliyya’s critics, most of them at least, is that they critique and stick around for the most part—largely because of what they tell us verbatim at times: “We expect more from Jadaliyya,” or something of the sort. Now the question of who these critics are depends on the issue, and often our biggest critics on one topic are our biggest fans on another. Syria is a good example where we get flack from both pro-opposition corners and anti-opposition corners, but you would find avid readers of other Jadaliyya pages among both varieties. Do we have critics that do not think Jadaliyya is worth reading at all? You bet! There is very little we can do to convince those voices otherwise. Having said all of that, the fact is that Jadaliyya has filled a gap and presented a centrifugal force around which critics of mainstream discourse on the region in the United State and beyond hover. That in and of itself has generated detractors. 

UL: It seems to me that Jadaliyya has a pretty clear, consistent identity, both in its politics and its theoretical orientations. The people who edit and write it are generally the same age and peer group, and many have known each other for a long time. Do you think you have a wide enough variety of views? Do you feel like Jadaliyya has been able to spark debates outside of a community of like-minded contributors and readers? 

BH: [One factual note: the editors and contributors are by no means of similar age or belong to similar social circles—not after 2011, regarding the latter comment, and have never been, regarding the former comment. We have had more than a thousand contributors and the Jadaliyya team surpasses eighty people living in different countries now. Any cursory view of any fifty consecutive posts reveals a variety that easily surpasses most comparable publications. As for views, it is a political challenge, not always a question of diversity. See below.]

This is the one-million dollar question. Yes, any good publication must struggle with this dialectic of building a readership based on a particular kind/nature of knowledge production, but then expanding it to attract new readership and contributors while retaining the reason for its success. Are we guilty of not doing this perfectly? Absolutely. Have we gone far beyond most other publications to allow for serious internal differences and reach out to new and alternative views? Absolutely. But that does not exhaust the question. As mentioned above, we are in the building stage, and we view a good part of the shortcomings as related byproducts. However, this is one of our fundamental goals as we enter and complete our fifth year, and it will not come without its risks, risks we are very happy to take. Most importantly in reference to sparking discussion or debates, Jadaliyya articles have been written about and discussed in conferences and in social media in ways that have actually jump-started broader research questions and helped set research agendas—not to mention the impact of Jadaliyya on the carriers of junior writers who make their debut there and then get picked up by other institutions who are hiring, paying, and producing knowledge. The list is pretty long.

Having said that, two comments are relevant here. First, we are not and do not pretend to be an open forum for all views. Though I suspect you recognize that and you are not asking about why we do not highlight and invite problematic (racist, sexist, classist, etc. writers), but rather, from within the perspective we support, we may still afford more variety—and that is totally fair, and the above addresses our need to meet this challenge in increasingly better ways.

The second comment is political, and refers to the context within which Jadaliyya and other publications emerged in recent years. We see ourselves as a counter-discourse in relation to the dominant and quite entrenched discourse on the Middle East in the United States primarily, but also beyond. We also see ourselves in the same manner in relation to the petro-media empire of some Arab states. In this context, we are trying to provide an alternative reference point for sound daily analysis on the region. To establish that difficult reality and standard, we have had to be more focused on consistency and quality, sometimes at the expense of maximum diversity. So, we are not, per se, seeking diversity of “views” in the absolute sense, which is a matter/goal that speaks more to liberal concerns that are often divorced from realities of power and its direct relation to dominant discourses. However, where we have room to improve on this particular point, which is how we understand your question, is to establish even more diversity “within” the “general” perspective we endorse. And, yes, we do have some work to do in that respect, but not always for lack of trying. We are fighting an uphill battle and we also have to pay attention to the challenge of dragging everyone along while expanding this spectrum (i.e., the million-dollar challenge/question above). The years ahead will speak louder than any words regarding our genuine interest in making this happen within the context of a counter-discourse movement.

Also, we do not pay our writers, and this restricts us by excluding many careerist writers who might have provided a diversity of sorts despite differing views.

Finally, it is important to note that beyond the essentials, we have ongoing viewpoint disagreements within Jadaliyya regarding content and particular pieces. We think it is a testament to the absence of a rigid conception regarding which particular views are welcome.

UL: Finally, there is an argument that young academics should focus on scholarly work and publication and not "waste" their ideas and time on writing for web sites and other venues. How do you respond to that? 

BH: We totally agree in principle, considering the kind of online publications and quality that proliferates. And whereas we would give the same advice, we cannot ignore the fact that the strategic position of Jadaliyya within the academic community can be a plus for rising academics who would like to be read and heard. Last year alone, several folks within and outside Jadaliyya remarked to us how valuable their Jadaliyya contributions were in capturing the attention of employers/academics in the hiring process. This semi-exception is borne out of the fact that Jadaliyya has indeed become the go-to place for academics generally, despite what this or that observer can say, sometimes legitimately, about the quality of this or that post. We just have to make sure that this continues to be kept to a minimum in the coming five, or ten, years!

So, in short, it depends. In the case of Jadaliyya, publishing there can be used strategically to enhance one’s chances of getting an academic job. We used to think that this was not the case before we were told otherwise by employers and during academic interviews. Used properly, it can be a plus, and this is not confined to Jadaliyya, as there are a number of quality publications out there. The world is changing, and the academic community is following suit, even if at a few steps behind.

UL: Are you planning on publishing anything soon on Obama`s war on ISIS?

BH: Yes, we have published a number of pieces addressing the rise and nature of ISIS, in both Arabic and English, and, beginning the week of 22 September, our fourth anniversary incidentally, we are publishing a regular media roundup specifically on ISIS-related articles. Stay tuned!