Live with ASI: Episode 2.6 Digest — December 2021

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Dec 9, 2021
Live with ASI: Episode 2.6 Digest — December 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.6 Digest — December 2021

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[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 co-hosts MK Smith and Bassam Haddad commemorated Jadaliyya’s eleventh anniversary, discussed new installments in the Ten Years On project, new texts out now, a brand new podcast on the impacts of COVID-19 on the Arab World titled “Mofeed-19,” and new episodes of “Search Files” and “Connections.”

This episode featured interviews with Nadje Al-Ali, Kylie Broderick, Owain Lawson, Sinan Antoon, Katty Alhayek, Hesham Sallam, Camille Cole, Jessica Holland, and Samia Errazzouki. 

Partner’s Feature: Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies (4:44)


Nadje Al-Ali describes the contributions of Brown University’s Watson Institute to the collaborative Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project. Al-Ali also explained her commitment to cooperation, not competition, when addressing such important academic topics. 


As we have said so many times before, much of the work we do at ASI would be impossible without the collaboration and joint effort with our many partners. This time we wanted to highlight one of our deeply valued partners: Nadje al-Ali.

Nadje is a truly inspiring scholar. She is currently the Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her research focuses primarily on feminist activism and gender mobilization in the region. 

Jadaliyya Eleventh Anniversary (10:50)


Over the course of this hectic year, the Jadaliyya team was hard at work, producing all sorts of content on pressing issues, be they panels, podcasts, book talks, or roundtables, dealing with pressing issues ranging from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, marking 100 years since the founding of Lebanon, the Hirak protests in Algeria, the aftermath of the Gezi protests and the shifting Islamist sector in Turkey, to the Israeli assault on Gaza over the summer. 


Managing Editor of Jadaliyya and PhD student in History at UNC Chapel Hill, Kylie Broderick, tells the audience about the Jadaliyya anniversary post and what content can be found in it.


Co-Editor of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page Owain Lawson discusses the past year, and what the Environment Page has produced.

Ten Years On Project (21:13)


A rare moment on air with esteemed guests overlap between interviews. Katty Alhayek signs off after recapping a recent Ten Years On panel event on Arab women filmmakers, while Sinan Antoon signs on to reflect the founding of Jadaliyya eleven years ago. 


We are now in the 12th and final month of the year-long project, Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World. For those new here, the Ten Years On project is a collaborative initiative launched with the intention 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 present.

It has been an outstanding year, with more than a dozen signature panels, roundtables, book talks, and posts dealing with the uprisings and their aftermath from various perspectives. 

Last month, ASI co-sponsored an event put on by Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies titled, “Women’s Filmmaking in the Aftermath of the Uprisings,” which brought together prominent Arab women filmmakers for an online panel discussion on their experiences capturing both pivotal moments, as well as everyday life, in Yemen, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. 

Also last month, Mona El-Ghobashy gave a talk based on her new book, “Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation.” In this talk, Mona presents an interpretation of Egypt’s 2011 uprising that brings out some lost connections between democracy and revolution, and tries to push beyond viewing the Egyptian uprising as a uniform failure. This talk is a must-watch for anyone looking to explore the nuances of the Egyptian experience, as more than simply a failed democratic transition or inauthentic revolution.

Mofeed-19 Podcast (30:40)


Jadaliyya Co-Editor Hesham Sallem introduces viewers to a brand new podcast about the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Arab world. 


Launched in partnership between ASI and the Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Mofeed-19 is the aptly-named 19-minute video podcast that discusses research efforts pertaining to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Arab world. 

The podcast, co-hosted by Hesham Sallam and Amr Hamzawy, is part of the Mofeed-19 Project, an initiative that builds foundational resources for understanding how the politics and societies of the Arab world have adapted in light of the pandemic.

Their third episode, which featured award-winning journalist and Mada Masr Editor, Lina Attalah, examines the challenges of reporting about the pandemic in Egypt and explains the conditions that have shaped dominant narratives about COVID-19 in the country.

Search Files Podcast - Episode 2 (38:44)


Jessica Holland and Camille Cole offer highlights from a recent Search Files episode on think tank “experts” and pedagogical teaching modules. 


Earlier this fall, the Knowledge Production Project (KPP) and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) introduced a new podcast called “Search Files,” which covers trends in knowledge production and pedagogy on the Middle East and North Africa based on a constantly evolving dataset and pedagogic research. 

In the second-ever episode of Search Files, Bassam and Jessica Holland—the Manager of Knowledge Production and Pedagogy at FAMA—interviewed three scholars on the cutting edge of research on knowledge production trends: Alejandro Paz, who is examining think tank “expertise,” Peter Mandaville, who works on pedagogy and teaching modules on Islam, and Camille Cole, who is working on a teaching module on the environment and the region.  

Connections Podcast - Crises in the Maghreb (48:52)


Jadaliyya Co-Editor Samia Errazzouki provides insights into recent tensions between Algeria and Morocco, stemming in part from conflict over Western Sahara. 


For those that don’t know, Connections is a podcast series hosted by dear friend of the show, Mouin Rabbani, and it offers timely and informative interviews on current events and broader policy questions, as well as themes relevant to knowledge production, combining journalism, analysis, and scholarship.  

In the latest episode, titled “Crises in the Maghreb,” Mouin spoke with fellow Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Samia Errazouki, regarding escalating tensions between Morocco and Algeria, as well as the deteriorating situation in the Western Sahara.

NEWTONs (56:29)


Several of the NEWTONs published this month center on women’s issues, so we selected two to highlight. 

First, Nadine Naber published an article in a special edition of the Feminist Studies Journal. The article, titled “The Radical Potential of Mothering during the Egyptian Revolution”, challenges the sensationalist depictions of mothering during the  Egyptian revolution of 2011. By “unsentimentalizing” mothering and exploring its radical potential within the context of the uprising, this article critiques patriarchal representations, whether pro-regime and traditionally nationalist or revolutionary nationalist.  

Elora Shehabuddin’s book Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism. This book argues that feminist movements in the Anglo-American West and in Muslim South Asia have developed in tandem rather than in isolation—and indeed helped to construct one another. The book interweaves stories of conflict with stories of encounters that led writers to reconsider gender norms in their own society—similar to how one might discover imperfections when studying oneself in a mirror.

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
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Jadaliyya Reports

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