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 (19 February)

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

Watch on Jadaliyya's YouTube Channel


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.

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.]