Call for Applications: MESA Global Academy Scholarships (2022-2023)

Call for Applications: MESA Global Academy Scholarships (2022-2023)

Call for Applications: MESA Global Academy Scholarships (2022-2023)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Applications

MESA Global Academy

Scholarships for 2022-2023 Academic Year


Deadline: 16 May 2022

Click Here to Apply


The MESA Global Academy is an interdisciplinary initiative of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) designed to sustain essential research collaborations and knowledge production among MENA-focused academics by providing competitive scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America. The MESA Global Academy is a project of MESA in partnership with the City University of New York and other university partners, with generous support from the Carnegie Corporation. 

The MESA Global Academy is pleased to announce its call for applications for the 2022-2023 academic year. The Global Academy is supporting scholars working in the area of governance, accountability, and the rule of law, and scholars working on fairness and economic equality. The Global Academy conceives of these two areas in interdisciplinary terms, and invites scholars to apply from the humanities and social sciences, from comparative literature, history, and Islamic studies to political science, anthropology, economics, and beyond. Please see below for descriptions of the topic areas.  

Global Academy scholars are required to attend a number of research workshops hosted by partner universities in their area of focus. Each must present their own research at one workshop and serve as a discussant at another; other engagements are welcome and encouraged. The scholars are also required to attend five professional development workshops. In addition, scholars are sponsored to attend and participate in at least one MESA Annual Meeting (currently scheduled for December 2022 and November 2023). A $5,000 award covers both travel and research expenses, with travel funds contingent on the reinstitution of in-person events.
 

Areas of Focus


Governance, Accountability, and the Rule of Law
This research cluster focuses on the potential for rule of law enhancement and governance reform in the MENA region following the Arab uprisings. Topics connected to this thematic cluster include, but are not limited to: judicial independence; designing anti-corruption reforms; decentralization and increased participation; equity and inclusiveness in public service delivery; impartial law enforcement; and transparency and accountability promotion within the administrative state.

Fairness and Economic Equality
This research cluster focuses on the demands for socio-economic justice emanating from a region that is marked by an unprecedented degree of socio-economic inequality, a youth bulge, and high levels of unemployment. Topics to be addressed in this cluster include, but are not limited to: socio-economic demands in the region and increasing present-day inequalities; constitutional protections for socio-economic rights; preventive health services; inter-generational poverty; labor markets; education and social mobility; youth employment; food and water insecurity; environmentally sustainable social development; expanding access to basic services; trends in public expenditure for infrastructure investment; and the relationship between sustainable development goals and social justice.

Eligibility


The MESA Global Academy offers competitive fellowships to Middle East Studies scholars from the MENA region who are currently displaced in North America. Eligibility criteria for the fellowships include: 1) holding a PhD or equivalent in a field in the social sciences or humanities (graduate students will not be considered); 2) the primary institutional affiliation was in the MENA region prior to displacement; and 3) a publication record indicating scholarly productivity (in English, French, a native MENA language, or principal research language of the field).

To apply, please click here


The deadline for applications for the 2022-2023 academic year is 16 May 2022.

You may reach out to Mimi Kirk, Program Manager, at mimi@mesana.org with any questions about the Global Academy or the application process. 

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