ANNOUNCEMENT: Arab Studies Institute (ASI)- Call for Interns!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Arab Studies Institute (ASI)- Call for Interns!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Arab Studies Institute (ASI)- Call for Interns!

By : Jadaliyya Reports

This is a call for 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 interns at the Institute. 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 beginning on November 15.

 

 

ARAB STUDIES INSTITUTE

The Arab Studies Institute is seeking interns for various positions, particularly those skilled in social media management, video editing (for YouTube Shorts), and Palestine research.


Social Media Manager 

ASI is seeking a Social Media Manager to streamline social media across the Institute’s five branches. Applicants should be familiar with all social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), various social media assisting platforms (LinkTree, Buffer) as well as design software (Canva and Photoshop). Candidates should value creativity, and initiative. This position has the possibility of a stipend depending upon qualifications.

Position responsibilities will include: 

  1. Designing graphics for all new projects and publications 

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

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

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

 

Video/Audio Editors

ASI is seeking interns who have experience editing audio and video to help produce shows, interviews, and events produced by ASI. Applicants must have a working proficiency in Final Cut Pro. 

Internship responsibilities will include:

  1. Edit audio and video files for special events and ongoing series affiliated with any of ASI’s five branches.

  2. Assist the ASI Broadcast Team in keeping up a schedule of audio-visual production.

 

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.


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.

Books Database Researchers:

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

Responsibilities for the Books Database research assistant will include:

  1. Researching and cataloging book reviews related to the Middle East.

  2. Evaluating the content and method of production of said book reviews.

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

 

Films Database Researchers:

The Knowledge Production Project is seeking a research assistant to work on the Films Database. Experience with data entry is preferred but not required for this position. 

Responsibilities for the Films Database research assistant will include:

  1. Researching and cataloging films related to the Middle East

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

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

 

Dissertation Database Researchers:

The Knowledge Production Project is seeking a research assistant to work on the Dissertation Database. Experience with data entry is preferred but not required for this position. 

Responsibilities for the Dissertation Database research assistant will include:

  1. Researching and cataloging dissertations related to the Middle East

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

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


STATUS:

Status/الوضع is an audio-visual magazine which features interviews/conversations, on-the-scene reports, reviews, informed commentary and lectures held around the world on the Middle East and North Africa.

Producer:

Status is seeking producers for its various broadcasts and programs. Applicants must have strong organizational and leadership skills.  

Internship responsibilities will include:

  1. Curating a schedule of content releases.

  2. Assisting the Status team in booking new talents to be interviewed on various programs. 

  3. Assist in the editing of existing audio-visual content.

 

Benefit to the Student Intern:

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.


  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Hatem Bazian addresses the historical trajectory of Islamophobia and its significance in understanding geopolitical transformation in the post-Cold War world. As Western ideologues shifted from their focus on the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and increasingly adopted the Clash of Civilizations paradigm to undergird their maintenance of global hegemony, Islam and Muslims replaced communism as the chief bogeyman. Bazian explains how and why this came about, and the centrality Palestine played in its development and operation, both in the West and for Israel. He also addresses US government disciplining of universities and particularly student activists.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

Aug 1, 2024 Lebanon

Review of "Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire"

[This is a review published by the Arab Studies Journal Spring 2024 issue, which is now available for purchase. Click here to subscribe to Arab Studies Journal.]

Historians of the late Ottoman Empire have long contended that Bedouin were opposed to standardized administrative state-making or victims of increasingly colonial forms of governance in eastern Anatolia and Arabic-speaking provinces. In her groundbreaking new book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, Nora Barakat turns this conventional wisdom on its head and shows how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating people actively participated in Ottoman state transformation, reform of property regimes, and capitalist development. Instead of finding a history of intractable differences, Barakat traces how Bedouin contributed to Ottoman state-making and carved out local power that allowed them to protect communal interests. By registering land, aiding in taxation, participating in legal proceedings, and mediating between the central government and their communities, local headmen and middling administrators contributed to making the Syrian interior more legible and productive. Although they did not fit into official schemes of government administration, they were in effect what Barakat terms “Bedouin bureaucrats”: active participants in Ottoman governance and often the face of imperial administration.

Moving between the local and imperial, the book skillfully explores how Ottoman imperatives to retain and expand sovereignty translated into projects to develop and cultivate land in the Syrian interior. Barakat shows how the Ottomans “joined other imperial polities in attempting to fill landscapes they defined as legally empty, closely managing land and its human inhabitants and incorporating both into territorially bounded grids of administrative law” (4). These changes were connected to global financial crises in the 1870s and movements toward enclosure. Specifically, Barakat argues that attempts to preserve and expand sovereignty led to two major developments. First was the project of making “state space,” a term she draws on to describe “the landscape within a territorially conceived and hierarchical administrative and judicial apparatus and a theoretically uniform and bounded grid of property relations” (4). Second was a shift from layered forms of sovereignty toward a “nationalizing empire,” where “lawmakers and officials attempted to integrate formerly lightly governed landscapes and their inhabitants into a more cohesive, standardized, and ultimately . . . national territorial landscape” (5). Bedouin bureaucrats were integral to both projects.

The book centers the political economy of the region and draws on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, including chronicles, shari‘a court records, land registers, and imperial records. Barakat begins by introducing readers to the Syrian interior and members of the Wiraykat family of the Adwan Bedouin who traveled to Salt (in today’s Jordan) to register rights to land they cultivated during the summer. Later in the study, Barakat follows the family into the twentieth century and examines how land they registered in 1879 served as collateral for loans and other commercial transactions. It is just one of many accounts that upend how we understand relationships between tent-dwelling nomads and the Ottoman state in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The first two chapters provide a history of long-standing relationships between the Ottoman state and Bedouin communities, challenging the idea that the region was a tribal frontier prior to nineteenth-century reforms. Chapter 1, “Beyond the Tribal Frontier,” reconstructs relations between the central government and Bedouin communities that provided security for overland trade and pilgrimage routes between Damascus and Mecca. This chapter is one of several that take up questions of shifting and layered sovereignty. Barakat shows how the Bani Sakhr enjoyed administrative control in the eighteenth century, while being in a “geographically amorphous Ottoman ‘sphere of submission’” (27). Their position in pilgrimage administration and dense networks allowed them to acquire political capital they would later mobilize to resist more direct state intervention. In chapter 2, “Commercial Capital in the Syrian Interior,” Barakat explores how the global wheat boom prompted camel-herding communities to pursue agriculture. As Bedouin leaders established a regional land market and generated extensive wealth, Ottoman modernizers sought to usurp their administrative sovereignty and integrate these frontiers more fully into state space.

The next two chapters investigate political renegotiations between the central government and Bedouin, as well as projects of mapping “tribes” and land. Through meticulous research in court and land records, chapter 3, “Producing Tribes and Property,” considers the interconnected projects of making standardized state space and administrative categories, and the role of Bedouin in each. Chapter 4, “Bureaucracy in Crisis,” illustrates how Bedouin bureaucrats became more directly involved in trade and local politics and used their social and political influence to resist state encroachment. When the central government defined their lands as “empty”—often a first step toward settling Circassian and Chechen refugees—Bedouin bureaucrats were able to defend community rights. Their power derived from both older forms of political and social capital and the networks they built through tax collection and legal proceedings. Bedouin also resisted the state’s claims to the exclusive right to allocate and register land by creating an unofficial land market. We see in the conclusion to the study how these administrative categories continue to inform politics in Jordan and Palestine/Israel. 

Chapter 5, “Taxation, Property, and Citizenship,” traces how Bedouin became politically active and were reimagined as potentially loyal Ottomans (similar to Muslim refugees). In addition to highlighting the importance of property ownership and administration to preserving and extending Ottoman sovereignty, Barakat documents how state fears of non-Muslim property ownership in frontier regions created space for Bedouin to acquire power through land sales. While Bedouin bureaucrats did not have seats at the proverbial table in provincial politics, they were nevertheless crucial to the exercise of Ottoman power. The chapter offers a compelling new way to understand political participation in settings that Ottomanists have long ignored. It also intervenes in debates about subjecthood and citizenship that have centered on questions of nationality and extraterritoriality or elite provincial politics. The “right to participate in the practices of self-governance,” Barakat argues, was one way that “the question of political rights went beyond and preceded constitutional politics to encompass the representative governing councils created by the Tanzimat, which became extremely powerful during the Hamidian period, especially in the realm of property relations” (207). By demonstrating their active engagement with property regimes and local government, Barakat shows that Bedouin bureaucrats were part of a political domain extending beyond local notables and merchant elites. 

By situating the study in a framework that encompasses Imperial Russia and the United States, Barakat also contributes to deexceptionalizing the Ottoman Empire. The choice of these two polities is predicated on their being expanding contiguous empires and “imperial nation-states,” where “law-makers and officials attempted to integrate formerly lightly governed landscapes and their inhabitants into a more cohesive, standardized, and ultimately, if highly contested, national territorial landscape” (5). This is a productive approach, and Barakat is careful to tease out what was unique about the Ottomans in their increasingly aggressive developmentalist schemes and approaches toward governing frontiers. She shows, for example, how unlike Kazakh nomads or Native Americans, Bedouin bureaucrats preserved control of most of their lands, maintained seasonal mobility, increased legal connections to the interior, and assumed administrative roles. A determining factor in their ability to do so was the absence of a “middle ground” between distinct legal traditions (114–15). Unlike in Russia or the United States, Barakat argues that nomadic communities and the Ottoman central government shared a specifically Islamic legal lexicon governing commercial and legal affairs, which temporally predated the Ottoman polity and geographically spanned the Indian Ocean world. Barakat’s findings suggest that this religious framework mediated relationships among centrally appointed reformers and government officials and the local bureaucrats they relied on to defend imperial sovereignty—particularly against non-Muslim powers and their protégés. It is not clear, however, if this was the case in other provinces or if the region and communities examined in the study were exceptional. 

Barakat’s global approach to mobility, property, and sovereignty also informs the legacy of Bedouin bureaucrats’ political participation and the extent to which the Ottomans were a colonial power. Barakat traces how the category of “the nomadic tribe” informed British and French rule and how colonial regimes opted to label land in contested regions as “empty” and under state domain. Despite these continuities, Barakat identifies a rupture in how European powers created separate legal regimes for Bedouin and moved from integration toward displacement and more extractive metropole-colony relationships. From the vantage point of the interwar mandate era, she distinguishes Ottoman imperialism from European colonialism and contends that the historiographical focus on Ottoman Orientalism obscures the integrative nature of Ottoman rule in the Syrian interior. Here, the reader is left wondering if Barakat might have extended her emphasis on the “deeply uneven processes of modern state formation” (272) to the similarly uneven nature of Ottoman colonialism and unrealized aspirations versus outcomes in the project of making state space.

Bedouin Bureaucrats succeeds in changing how we see Bedouin communities’ role in state transformation and their role as citizens of the empire. It is an erudite contribution to understanding connections between sovereignty, property, and legal reform well beyond the Ottoman context. Barakat seamlessly weaves the stories of the mobile men at the heart of the book into narratives of imperial and global change. Instead of the visions of all-too-familiar reformers and provincial governors for an “orderly village-based and settled countryside” (103), she provides a fuller picture of how tent-dwelling nomads and seasonally migrating people negotiated relationships with and were part of the making of Ottoman state space. The book is suitable for upper-level seminars and graduate courses and will be of interest to scholars of late Ottoman history, the modern Middle East, political economy, and comparative empires. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in the local and global forces that have shaped property rights, political participation, and governance in the modern Middle East.