Live with ASI: Episode 2.4 Digest — October 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.4 Digest — October 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.4 Digest — October 2021

By : Arab Studies Institute

Live with ASI is a monthly broadcast program that showcases recently published content from the Arab Studies Institute’s various branches. This content includes articles, reviews, pedagogical resources, podcasts, and more. Also featured in the broadcast are brand new interviews and discussions with authors and contributors.

This month, LWA guest co-hosts Mohammad Abou-Ghazala and Cat Haseman discussed pedagogy, discrimination and harassment in academia, the brand-new podcast “Search Files,” a new panel in the Ten Years On Project, a roundtable on the developments in the Turkish Islamist sector, a new issue of Status/الوضع, and talked to close partners of ASI.

This episode included engaging interviews with Abdullah Al-Arian, Jessica Holland, Omar Dahi, Zahra Babar, Starling Carter, Utku Balaban, Nihat Celik, Jon Ball, and Mouin Rabbani.

Jadaliyya 11th Anniversary (4:33)


Mohammad and Cat tell the audience to look out for an upcoming 11th anniversary post on Jadaliyya. 


It’s hard to believe that Jadaliyya just had it’s 11th birthday! Stay on the lookout for an 11th anniversary post on
Jadaliyya that will highlight a year of knowledge production and celebrate the many activists, journalists, and scholars who have collaborated, created, and published scholarship over the past year. 

Ten Years On Project Signature Panel: Activism in Exile Panel (5:00)


October marks the tenth month of the collaborative year-long project, Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World.

Last month, in partnership with the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar, the Ten Years On project put on another signature panel, titled, “Activism in Exile: Diasporic Communities in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings,” where the participants discussed the complex challenges faced by communities trying to combat authoritarian regimes from abroad. 

Co-moderated by Abdullah Al-Arian and Sami Hermez, this panel asked what is “new” about exiled communities recently formed in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings ten years ago, especially in light of the historical legacies of political organization by diaspora communities since the latter half of the twentieth century.

Abdullah Al-Arian spoke with LWA Producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala about the significance of diasporic communities in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings over the past decade.

Status Issue 8.2 (11:17)


Issue 8.2 of Status / الوضع audio-visual magazine is now live! 


Since its inception, Status has been a landmark online audio platform dedicated to the politics, histories, societies, cultures, and arts in the Middle East and North Africa, offering listeners timely, sophisticated, informed, and stimulating reflections and analyses from those intimately familiar with sites of contention.

This edition of Status covers a wide variety of topics ranging from Palestine, the Ten Years On project, and protests in Iran’s Khuzestan. 



Starling Carter, a new asset to the Status/الوضع team, joins live to talk about the future of the audio-visual platform. 

Partner’s Feature (16:36)


This episode, the co-hosts dedicated some time to highlighting a couple of ASI’s close partnerships: Security in Context, and the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar.

Security in Context is an interdisciplinary research and pedagogy initiative that promotes critical research and policy analysis around key questions related to peace and conflict, development, the politics of in/security and militarism. Most recently, Security in Context hosted a virtual panel discussion titled “Legacies and Aftermaths of the US "War On Terror.”


Omar Dahi discusses Security in Context’s goals, achievements, and productive working relationship with ASI.

Also during the Partner’s Feature, Zahra Babar, who is Associate Director of Research at the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar, joined the show to speak about the long history of collaboration and friendship between CIRS and ASI. 


Zahra Babar speaks to the collaborations between CIRS at Georgetown University in Qatar and ASI.

Search Files Podcast (29:28)


A brand-new podcast, titled “Search Files,” covers trends in knowledge production and pedagogy on the Middle East and North Africa based on a constantly evolving dataset and pedagogic research, co-hosted by Bassam Haddad and Jessica Holland, who is Manager of Knowledge Production and Pedagogy at the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs.

Search Files Podcast will bring the teams of the Knowledge Production Project and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative to converse with experts in data visualization and the Middle East and North Africa, as well as educators and faculty from industry and academia.

In the first episode, recorded last month, the co-hosts spoke with founder of Pitch Interactive Wesley Grubbs, and assistant Professor of Films and Media Studies at George Mason University Hatim El-Hibri, regarding data visualization of academic knowledge production, and approaches to teaching films in the classroom.



Jessica Holland describes the new knowledge production-focused podcast, Search Files. 

Discrimination and Bullying in Academia (34:43)


At the end of September, The Intercept published an article shedding light on the recent instance of attempted academic censorship by the Israeli government. Kylie Broderick, a UNC PhD student and the managing editor of Jadaliyya, has been targeted both by an Israeli diplomat and a US congresswoman, who accused Kylie of  antisemitism and claimed she is unfit to teach. 

In what amounts to a grave violation of academic freedom, both a foreign diplomat and an American elected official attempted to pressure the university to prevent Kylie from teaching a seminar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kylie incisively defends herself stating, “States are not religions, nor are states a people.”

Roundtable: “Shifting Islamist Sectors in Turkey” (39:30)


Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page organized another great roundtable titled, “Shifting Islamist Currents in Turkey,” which brought together an expert set of scholars to consider the ways in which the Islamist sector has been shifting over the two decades of AKP rule.

The participants grappled with this topic in a number of ways, looking at Islamism’s relationship to industrialization and development, the interaction of the Islamist sector and humanitarian NGOs, and the toxic intertwining of Islamism and ultra-nationalism in Turkey. As the editor’s write in their introduction, the team hopes that this roundtable might begin a conversation that other scholars will take up and continue.

Utku Balaban and Nihat Celik speak with Mohammad about their contributions to the roundtable, “The Shifting Islamic Sector in Turkey.”

Can the Question of Palestine be Resolved? (45:52)


In his piece, “Can the Question of Palestine be Resolved,” Mouin Rabbani addresses the purported “insolubility” of the Palestinian issue, and challenges the assumptions that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is irreversible. Instead, Rabbani draws comparisons to parallel struggles throughout the world, and examines the reality sponsored by those who stick to the Oslo Peace Process.


Jadaliyya Co-editor of the Quick Thoughts page, podcaster-extraordinaire, and dear friend of the broadcast, Mouin Rabbani joined the show to discuss his new, ever-pertinent article “Can the Question of Palestine be Resolved?”

Pedagogy (51:47)


The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) published a bundle of three “Peer-Reviewed Article Reviews,” in which they present a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and the Arab world. In collaboration with the Ten Years On Project, MESPI also released the first of three bouquets covering academic articles on various aspects of the Arab uprisings. This first bouquet features articles published from 2010 to 2020 dealing with cultural production in the context of the Arab uprisings. 



PRAR research assistant John Ball gives viewers a sneak peak into the bouquet of articles related to cultural production during the Arab Uprisings.

NEWTONS (57:03)


Chihab El Khachab’s new book “ Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry.” The book is an ethnography of the everyday work of commercial film production in Cairo, based on fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015. And, it describes the industry’s intricate working patterns, its division of labor, its production process, its logistical and creative issues, and its imagined audiences. 


Additionally, Nils Hägerdal’s “Friend or Foe: Militia Intelligence and Ethnic Violence in the Lebanese Civil War.” The book studies the role of ethnicity in civil war violence. The book

considers when militant organizations attack people based on their ethnic, sectarian, or religious identity rather than their individual traits, beliefs, or choice.

Must-Reads (58:05)


Bayan Abubakr wrote a piece titled “The Contradictions of Afro-Arab Solidarity(ies): The Aswan High Dam and the Erasure of the Global Black Experience.” The piece asks where Black communities indigenous to the Arabic-speaking world fit into the “geographies of liberation” that emerged through the making of an Afro-Arab political imaginary from the 1850s to the present day? 


Another piece, titled "My Amazigh Indigeneity (the Bifurcated Roots of a Native Moroccan)" by Brahim el Guabli, probes the concept of reclaiming indigeneity through the experiences of a biracial Amazigh man. The piece describes the rehabilitative power of indigeneity, which allows  Imazighen to claim through the land a collective identity that state policies have suppressed in search of an imaginary national unity.

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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