LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On: Displacement, Disruption and Scholarly Production in the Aftermath of Uprisings (3 November)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On: Displacement, Disruption and Scholarly Production in the Aftermath of Uprisings (3 November)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On: Displacement, Disruption and Scholarly Production in the Aftermath of Uprisings (3 November)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Middle East Studies Association
and the Ten Years On Project Present

Ten Years On:
Displacement, Disruption and Scholarly Production in the Aftermath of Uprisings 


Wednesday, November 3, 2021 
 
3:30 PM EDT 


This is the eigth signature event of the
Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project 

For more information, go to thearabuprisings.com 

Organized by the Middle East Studies Association and the Arab Studies Institute 

Featuring
Hamid Alawadhi (discussant)
Evren Altinkas
Morad Elsana
Selin Bengi Gümrükçü
Basileus Zeno

Ten years on from the uprisings in the Arab world—and with similar anniversaries in Iran and Turkey just past or upcoming—the specific effects of the displacements triggered in the aftermath of these events remain understudied. For example, in much of the region counter-revolutionary forces have targeted universities and scholars, clamping down on academic freedoms, criminalizing forms of research and study, and even reframing whole disciplines around national security priorities. Among the many impacts of authoritarian retrenchment has been a significant brain drain from parts of the region. How have these post-uprising displacements affected cultural production and knowledge production within and about the region? This panel will explore the disruptions to research and the circulation of ideas in and about the region as well as some of the generative possibilities and new networks that have been produced as a consequence of the many different forms of displacement that have affected scholars, students, activists, intellectuals and artists in the aftermath of uprisings.

Featuring


Hamid Alawadhi (discussant) 
is currently an Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and Middle Eastern Culture at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also teaches French at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a former Professor of Linguistics and Translation at the College of Arts and Humanities, Sana’a University, Yemen. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Translation Studies and an M.A. in Translation from the Sorbonne. He was the Chief Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia of Yemen, published in 2003 in four volumes. He is the author, translator, editor, or compiler of more than ten books and numerous articles. Dr. Alawadhi also had a diplomatic career, serving as an Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Yemen to UNESCO for five years. In addition, he was the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Sana’a University and then the Dean of the Diplomatic Institute of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Yemen. In 2014, he became Deputy Minister for Political Affairs in the Yemeni Foreign Ministry.

Evren Altinkas received postgraduate degrees from King’s College London in 2000 and from Dokuz Eylul University in 2003. He obtained his doctoral degree from Dokuz Eylul University in 2011 based on his dissertation comparing the development of the concept of intellectuals in Europe and in the Ottoman State/Turkey. Since July 2018, Altinkas has been employed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Guelph. His research areas are the History of the Middle East, Turkish History, Intellectual History and the Transformation from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Middle East and Turkey. He received the Chevening Scholarship for the academic year 1999-2000, and is a MESA Global Academy Fellow for the academic year 2021-2022. Altinkas is the newly appointed editor of H-TURK. Dr. Altinkas has several academic articles and book chapters published and has two articles in the process of publication as of September 2021. Both articles are about the Turkish War of Independence and the Unionist connection.

Morad Elsana is a research scholar and professor at American University in Washington, DC. Prior, he served as a visiting assistant professor of law at the California Western School of Law and fellow of the Israel Institute. Dr. Elsana holds a doctoratal degree in Juridical Science from the Washington College of Law. He is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships such as the Fulbright Outreach fellowship; the NIF Civil Rights Leadership fellowship; and the McGill University Middle East Program for Civil Society & Peace Building fellowship. His research focuses on human rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, legal pluralism comparative law, racial justice, and the Arab Minority in Israel. 

Selin Bengi Gümrükçü is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for European Studies (CES), Rutgers University. She received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2014 with a dissertation titled “Reconstructing a Cycle of Protest: Protest and Politics in Turkey, 1971-1985”. Before joining CES, she worked as a visiting scholar/lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University (2018-2020), as a lecturer (2014-2015) and Assistant Professor (2015-2016) at Izmir University, and as a research assistant at Izmir University of Economics (2007-2014). During and after her PhD, she held visiting positions at Bielefeld University, Sciences Po Paris, University of Paris 8, and more recently the European University Institute.

Basileus Zeno is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021. Dr. Zeno’s research centers around themes of forced migration, violence, colonial legacies, interpretive methodology, nationalism, and sectarianism in the Middle East. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in the United States, and has published in the Middle East Law and Governance journal and Jadaliyya and has other forthcoming peer-reviewed articles. Additionally, Dr. Zeno is a MESA Global Academy Fellow and part of the LSE research project “Legitimacy and citizenship in the Arab world.” 


Ten Years On
Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World


This event is part of the Ten Years on Project, a year-long series of events, reflections, and conversations created to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. We launched this project in order to interrogate and reflect on the uprisings, with the hope of producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.

Watch all of our previous Ten Years on events here:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Co-Sponsors: Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), University of Chicago (Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory), Stanford University (Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Stanford University), AUC Affiliates, Georgetown University (Qatar) Center For International And Regional Studies (CIRS), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), Institute of Palestine Studies.
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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