Event Announcement - Building on a Legacy: Dr. Halim Barakat (7 October 2023)

Event Announcement - Building on a Legacy: Dr. Halim Barakat (7 October 2023)

Event Announcement - Building on a Legacy: Dr. Halim Barakat (7 October 2023)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Building on a Legacy
Dr. Halim Barakat


Hosted by Halim Barakat's Family with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Jerusalem Fund
OCTOBER 7, 2023
Riggs Library, Georgetown University

Schedule


Welcome
Fida Adely
Director, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Georgetown University

Speakers

Adonis
Syrian Poet, Essayist, and Translator

Munir Bashour
Professor Emeritus, American University of Beirut

Sinan Antoon
Poet, Novelist, Scholar, and Translator

Edmund Ghareeb
Board Member, The Jerusalem Fund

Rochelle Davis
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University

Bassam Haddad
Founding Director, Middle East and Islamic Studies Program George Mason University

Beshara Doumani
Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies
, Brown University

Thank you and Closing Remarks

Jehad Abusalem
Executive Director, The Jerusalem Fund

Audience Remarks Reception 

Dr. Halim Barakat

(1931-2023)

Dr. Halim Barakat was a celebrated novelist, a prolific scholar, and a public intellectual committed to social justice, equality, and freedom in the Arab World— especially in his beloved Syria and Lebanon. His novels boldly engaged the biggest public debates, as well as the most deeply personal issues of his generation. His highly influential book on Arab society in the twentieth century, The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State, continues to be widely taught in the United States and in the Arab World. As one of the earliest faculty members of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Dr. Barakat was instrumental in shaping the identity, activities, and curriculum of CCAS during its formative years. Throughout his career, Dr. Barakat worked tirelessly for, in his words, “a unified, democratic, secular, and egalitarian Arab nation.” He also devoted much of his time to the Jerusalem Fund because he considered the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to be central to efforts to transform the Arab World. His humbleness and love of life communicated a beautiful sense of purpose to all those who had the fortune to know him.

Watch his eulogy here.

Words of Remembrance: Dr. Judith Tucker

I had the great good fortune to be a colleague of Halim Barakat’s for my first 20 years on the faculty at Georgetown, and I worked with him closely on the ongoing development of the Master of Arts in Arab Studies’ curriculum. Halim guided and shaped the program of study of Arab society and culture for our students, and generations of MAAS graduates benefitted enormously from his unparalleled knowledge of the social and literary terrains of the modern Arab World. He took a clear-eyed and iconoclastic approach in his scholarship and teaching, combining incisive critiques of Arab society with his deep belief in the power of social struggles to bring about change. His students gained empathy for the people of the region and appreciation for the complexities and achievements of Arab society and modern Arabic literature.

Along with other prominent Arab intellectuals from CCAS at the time – including Hisham Sharabi, Hanna Batatu, Ibrahim Oweiss – Halim was well-known in American academia and was also recognized and celebrated in the Arab World. His name was a passport: when I traveled in the region as a member of the CCAS faculty, the red carpet was rolled out for me as an associate of Halim’s.

Halim was a wonderful colleague. He was soft-spoken, gentle, and thoughtful, a favorite with the CCAS faculty, staff, and students. In twenty years, I never heard him raise his voice, and I never knew him to be petty or self-important – no small feats in the academic environment. Yet he always stood his ground on matters of principle and importance. He was a stalwart supporter and advocate for Palestinian rights even though taking these positions subjected him at times to vitriolic attacks. He will be much missed and long remembered for his many contributions to CCAS and the study of the Arab World, and perhaps above all for the great kindness he showed to everyone, regardless of station, who crossed his path.

The family invites anyone who would like to honor Dr. Barakat to make a contribution to the Halim and Hayat Barakat Endowed Scholarship through the Birzeit University Fund registered 501(c)(3) organization at:

https://bzufund.org/give-today/ 


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Education in the Time of Virality

Widespread access to the internet has facilitated means of acquiring news and information at rates unseen in earlier eras. As individuals, we have the ability to post and spread political information, social commentary, and other thoughts at will. This has caused an information overload for users of social networking sites. In a fight for views, reposts, and clicks, creators, both corporate and not, have been forced to develop new tactics to inform their audiences. This response to a new mode of information consumption also forces a reconsideration of how we understand knowledge production. Much of the information put forth into the world is absorbed passively, such as through characters’ storylines in books, films, and television - and this information accumulates over a lifetime. What, then, happens when knowledge is actively consumed (as is done when reading, watching, or listening to news stories), but the manner through which the information is presented still conforms to the brevity generally associated with more passive knowledge intake?

Pew Research estimates that over 70% of Americans use their phone to read the news. This is nearly a 25% increase since 2013. The constant barrage of advertisements in online articles does not make consuming news easy to do on a phone, thereby forcing media outlets and their competitors to change and adopt new tactics. Applications such as Flipboard have tried to mitigate these frustrations by simply providing the full article without the ads on their own platform, but many people still turn to sources like The Skimm. In attempting to distill a day’s worth of news coverage on domestic affairs, foreign affairs, pop culture, and sports into a few quips, undeniably both texture and nuance are lost. To compete with these services, CNN, the New York Times, and other mainstream news sources are doing the same and producing articles that give the, “Top 5 News Moments to Start Your Day,” or a, “Daily Brief.” Of course, looking at the language differences between the New York Times daily summary versus The Skimm’s, one can tell which is a more comprehensive news source. Even so, slashing the word count still takes a toll on clearly informing the public. The question then becomes, after quickly skimming through these summaries, are people doing more readings to cover what was lost? Or has “the brief” become the new standard for knowledge production and awareness?

It is more than likely that a significant portion of The Skimm’s subscribers do go on to read the full article linked in the email, but the growing popularity of similarly quick and fast news sources has had an impact on how much information viewers and readers actually understand. Between 2011 and 2014, The Skimm was founded, along with AJ+, Now This, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed News’ more serious journalism section. Undeniably, all of these sources produce and publish very important information, and make this information accessible to a larger audience. However, their production and marketing strategies hinge upon condensing very nuanced topics into videos that are, on average, only seven minutes long, as well as optimizing their materials for social media audiences. Now, it is ridiculous to expect highly textured and complicated issues to be thoroughly represented in these videos or posts. Even research based texts do not touch upon all of the complexities of a topic. The problems arise when looking at how viewers perceive themselves and their level of knowledge after actively searching out the products of, for example, AJ+ and Buzzfeed, for information. Carefully refining their materials to fit the shortened attention span of people scrolling through Facebook, social media news organizations have found their niche audience. Their products provide a simple way to deliver information to those who want gather knowledge on the “hot topics of today,” but do not what to do the leg work to be truly informed. These videos are spread throughout Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in a manner that says, “Watch this, and you will know what is going on in the world.”

Understanding how information is being pushed out into the world is almost as important as the content of the information. None of these outlets claim to provide comprehensive knowledge, but in being popular sites for information, the question becomes: do they have a responsibility to encourage their viewers to continue to inform themselves about these issues? Having a well-informed society is phenomenal, but if in informing society we are also forever altering how we consume knowledge to favor brevity over nuance, what consequences could come with this change? We must ensure that the consumption of these videos does not become a license for people to see themselves as truly informed and thus appropriate for them to take the microphones at protests and speak over those who have a solid and textured understanding of the issues. Information content is incredibly important, as is spreading knowledge, and AJ+, Now This, and the like have become important role models in showing how issues should be accessible to everyone and not clouted in jargon. But we must simultaneously consider the unintended side effects that these styles of videos have on knowledge production. Ultimately, it is a mutual effort. Just as producers must be watchful of their content and method of dissemination, we as consumers must be mindful of how we digest and understand the news we take in.


[This article was published originally Tadween`s Al-Diwan blog by Diwan`s editor, Mekarem Eljamal.]