2020 Essential Readings

2020 Essential Readings

2020 Essential Readings

By : Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)

We are pleased to share this annual review of our Essential Readings (ER) series. Individual ERs serve as teaching and research resources a specific geographic, temporal, and/or thematic subject by providing annotated lists of key works on the subject. Below we list (and link to) all those installments published in 2020, while providing a brief summer. Happy reading! 

2020 featured the launch of our ongoing “Essential Readings on The Left” series, which offers readers a starting place to explore key texts in the history and contemporary dynamics of leftist ideas, movements, and politics in the Middle East and North Africa.

Our first three contributions to the series were on:

  • Iranian Socialism and Communism by Eskander Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
    Sadeghi-Boroujerdi tracks the history of communist and socialist movements in Iran from the early twentieth century through the contemporary period. He does so through a meticulous reading of the historiography, highlighting its varied foci and methodological approaches as well as what gaps exist.
     
  • Marxism and the Left in Egypt by Joel Beinin
    Beinin tracks the history of communist movements in Egypt from the early twentieth century through the contemporary period. He is particularly attentive to shifts in the fate of the movements vis-à-vis local and global developments at the same time that highlights important internal struggles within the movements.
     
  • The Left in Mandate Palestine by Musa Budeiri
    Budeiri’s focus on the Mandate period allows him to delve into the wealth of Arabic, English, and Hebrew scholarship on leftist movements. Budeiri carefully curated a list of texts that trace the history of the movements, pivotal moments, its key players, its fringes, and much more.  


The launch of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page facilitated a new added focus to questions of environment:

  • Environment and Politics in the Middle East by Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, & Gabi Kirk
    Jadaliyya Environment Page co-editors provide readers with an installment that both outlines the foundational materials for approaching and discussing the environment in the Middle East and highlights the many new directions of the field through several recent publications on environment in the region.
     
  • Land, Water, and the Environment in Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
    Stamatopoulou-Robbins stresses the urgency of discussing and addressing the environment as a critical site of power relations in Palestine. Their disciplinarily-diverse selection of materials centers Palestinian voices in articulating the stakes of land, water, and environmental struggles in Palestine. Click here for a short interview with Stamatopoulou-Robbins on this ER installment.
      

2020 also featured a number of other overviews of critical scholarship:

  • The Hirak (Algerian Uprisings of 2019) by Muriam Haleh Davis and Thomas Serres
    Davis and Serres capture many analytic voices speaking to the 2019 uprisings in Algeria, including academic articles in both French and English, as well as essays, newspaper articles, and opinion pieces in English, French, and Arabic.
     
  • Politics and Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa by Nicola Pratt
    Pratt highlights the importance and value of a concentrated attention to popular culture. Her annotated list speaks to the links between popular culture and identity, dissemination of political ideas, constitutive of politics, and political economy.
     
  • “Democracy Promotion” by Benjamin Schuetze
    Schuetze points to the long history of “democracy promotion” and provides a critical framework for making sense of the most important works on the topic. 


  • Druze History by Graham Auman Pitts
    Pitts provides a “summation of what have been key resources for scholars in the Anglo-American academy” with respect to the history of the Druze across the region.


To view our entire listing of Essential Readings installments, please visit the Essential Readings Page.

[If you are interested in contributing an Essential Readings installment as a standalone resource or part of our various series, please contact our Essential Readings Coordinator Jacob Bessen.]

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Peer-Reviewed Articles Review: Spring 2022 (Part III)

      Peer-Reviewed Articles Review: Spring 2022 (Part III)

      The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brings you the twentieth in a series of “Peer-Reviewed Article Reviews” in which we present a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. This series will be published seasonally. Each issue will comprise three-to-four parts, depending on the number of articles included.

    • Gaza in Peer-Reviewed Articles (2005-2021)

      Gaza in Peer-Reviewed Articles (2005-2021)

      The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brings you this bouquet of pieces including peer-reviewed articles on Gaza. These items in our database were published in peer-reviewed academic journals for the years 2005-2021.

    • Edward Said in Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals (1979-2021)

      Edward Said in Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals (1979-2021)

      The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brings you this bouquet of pieces, including peer-reviewed articles, on, or by, Edward Said. These items in our database were published in peer-reviewed academic journals for the years 1979-2021. For more bouquets, visit www.mespi.org.


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.]