Teaching the War on Terror in Today's Classrooms: Challenges and Practices (19 February)

Teaching the War on Terror in Today's Classrooms: Challenges and Practices

Featuring:

Yousef Baker
Mariam Durrani
Sarah Ghabrial
Bassam Haddad
Jay Shelat
Pheroze Unwalla

Moderated by Mekarem Eljamal

19 February 2024
1pm EST

Last March marked the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, promoted at that time as a reprisal for the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a vital military campaign within the broader ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT). Today, while many students born after 9/11 see these inaugural events of the millennium as “history,” recent months have shown us the degree to which the GWOT permeates and structures everyday life. The cultures and infrastructures of the GWOT are now deeply ingrained in numerous domains, most notably higher education. As educators working on university campuses, many of us inhabit a curiously doubled roll as both subjects/teachers and objects/targets of the GWOT. This roundtable offers a space to discuss strategies and pedagogical practices for addressing increasingly repressive and panoptic climates on campus.

This roundtable is in collaboration with MESA's Committee on Undergraduate Middle East Studies (CUMES)

Yousef Baker is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the I/ST Department and also the co-director of the Middle East Studies Program. Dr. Baker looks at global political economy with an interest in how race, nationalism, sovereignty, post-colonial development, and social movements shape our contemporary world. His work focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has been looking at the political economy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

Mariam Durrani is a linguistic anthropologist and a professorial lecturer at American University’s School of International Service. Her scholarship and advocacy are located at the intersection of global racialization, Muslim youth identity, migration, and critical education studies in the U.S., Pakistan, and online.

Sarah Ghabrial is an associate professor of history at Concordia University, in Montreal. Her research and teaching deal with issues of race, colonialism, Islam, and state and non-state law, with particular focus on the modern history of the Maghreb.

Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

Jay Shelat is an assistant professor of English at Ursinus College where he teaches courses in contemporary literature. His work can be found or is forthcoming in MELUS, Studies in American Fiction, TSLL, the CEA Critic, and elsewhere. He’s currently working on a book project that examines the effects post-9/11 sociolegal policies have on kinships and domesticities of color.

Pheroze Unwalla is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of History and Chair of the Middle East Studies (MES) program at the University of British Columbia. His present work seeks to create new pedagogical approaches in MES and Middle East History, with a focus on classroom emotionality and critical hope interventions.