ASI Call for Interns

ASI Call for Interns

ASI Call for Interns

By : Jadaliyya Reports

This is a call for project coordinators and interns in various positions at the Arab Studies Institute. The Arab Studies Institute is the umbrella organization for the Arab Studies Journal, Jadaliyya, Quilting Point, Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs (FAMA), and Tadween Publishing

Below are the specific positions available for project coordinators and interns at the Institute. In the event that an applicant does not meet the criteria for one of the specific positions listed, they may apply for a general internship. All ASI team members volunteer their time to one extent or another. “Internships” fit into this formula during the initial internship period with the possibility of a stipend henceforth.

Applicants need not be based in the Washington, D.C. or Beirut, Lebanon area. All internship positions are virtual unless explicitly stated otherwise

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

ARAB STUDIES INSTITUTE 


Communications Manager:

ASI is seeking a Communications Manager to organize and lead communication efforts across the Institute’s five branches. In addition to streamlining social media across the Institute, the Communications Manager will be charged with developing ASI’s external network. Applicants should be familiar with promotional design and distribution software such as Canva, Hootsuite, and MailChimp, as well as all relevant social media platforms.Creativity and leadership skills are highly valued. This position has the possibility of a stipend depending upon qualifications.

Position responsibilities will include: 

  1. Creating weekly campaigns to promote various ASI projects 

  2. Coordinate with ASI Social Media Manager to develop and schedule social media campaigns 

  3. Communicating important Institute news and updates to team members

  4. Designing graphics for all new projects and publications 

  5. Promoting said projects and publications via graphics and other innovative means on ASI official social media accounts 

  6. Collaborating with the ASI Broadcast Team to promote live-streaming content

  7. Collaborating with the ASI Broadcast Team to update our database of broadcast guests current with appropriate social media handles and information 
     

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION PROJECT 


Knowledge Production Project
is a dynamic, open-access archive, search tool, and data visualization platform. This project, almost a decade in the making, endeavors to gather, organize, and make available for analysis all knowledge produced on the Middle East since 1979, in nine databases.

Database Researchers:

The Knowledge Production Project is seeking a research assistant to work on their nine databases. Experience with data entry is preferred, but not required for this position. 

Responsibilities for the Database research assistant will include:

  1. Researching and cataloging book reviews, films, dissertations, or articles related to the Middle East.

  2. Evaluating the content and method of production of said products.

  3. Work closely with the database coordinator to decide upon new paths of research.
     

JADALIYYA 


Jadaliyya
 
is an independent e-zine that provides a unique source of insight and critical analysis that combines local knowledge, scholarship, and advocacy with an eye to audiences in the United States, the Middle East and beyond.

Media Roundup Coordinators:

Media roundup editors will be responsible for managing, scheduling, and augmenting the material for either a weekly or monthly roundup for a particular page, in coordination with the page editors. Positions are available for Jadaliyya’s Maghreb Page, Palestine Page, Environment Page, Arabian Peninsula, and Turkey Page. Jadaliyya is seeking applicants who can speak English, Arabic, French, or Turkish.

Internship responsibilities will include:

  1. Curate and annotate the media roundup based on our standard operating procedures.

  2. Perform basic copyediting on all roundup articles.

  3. Maintaining a routine monthly schedule for roundup posts.

  4. Coordinate with the page editor for strategies and content.
     

MESPI (Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative) 


The
Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) is a project of FAMA, ASI's research arm. MESPI is a curated interactive platform for Middle East Studies resources specifically tailored to the needs of teachers, researchers, and students.

Peer-Reviewed Articles Review Assistant:

The Peer-Reviewed Article Reviews team curates a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. This series is published seasonally. Each issue consists of one-to-three parts, depending on the number of articles included.

Internship responsibilities will include:

  1. Mining and cataloging peer-reviewed articles on or about the Middle East

  2. Analyzing samples of data and identifying trends in knowledge production around a specific country or topic
     

Geographies of the Future - Research Assistant:

ASI is co-sponsor of “Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab-majority world through virtual reality” which brings together 8 artists/artist collectives from the MENA/SWANA region to render impossible worlds and alternative futures through experimentation with virtual media and film. The exhibition will be installed simultaneously at several US universities and an institution in the MENA/SWANA region, in Fall 2024. 

The project is looking for a Research Assistant/intern to provide support with exhibition fundraising, promotion and coordination. The ideal Research Assistant/intern would have an interest in contemporary art/photography/digital media and the environment. Skills in graphic design, (experience with SketchUp/Adobe Suite is a plus) and/or web design experience would be a plus. The RA will gain skills in grant writing/proof reading for applications to major US funders including NEH, exhibition design and implementation, and supporting with project and stakeholder management. This is an exciting opportunity for any student/graduate who would like to help realise an ambitious project, alongside a collaborative team of academics, activists and curators.

Of foremost concern to ASI is the benefits the student will receive while completing this program, and we expect that each student intern will have the opportunity to achieve the following benefits in addition to working toward academic credit:

Career-related experience

Practical knowledge of the field

Opportunity to explore career avenues

Valuable experience for CVs/resumes

Increased practice-based self-confidence

Training that enhances conventional classroom learning methods

Letters of recommendation from supervisor(s) and co-workers

[Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.]

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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