Middle East Studies | Calls for Papers & Conferences

Conferences & Calls for Papers

The Middle East and North Africa Graduate Student Association - University of Arizona
 
Current Trends in the Study of the Middle East, North Africa & their Diasporas

The Middle East and North Africa Graduate Student  Association, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona cordially invite you to participate in the 11th Annual Southwest Graduate Conference in Middle Eastern Studies to be held from Tuesday, March 29, 2011 to Thursday, March 31, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona.

The aims of the conference are to strengthen ties between academic disciplines, provide a platform for graduate students to present their research projects, exchange ideas, and create a network of emerging scholars spanning a variety of fields.

Paper themes should relate to Current Trends in the Study of the Middle East, North Africa & their Diasporas. This may include, but is not limited to: religion, history, literature, gender, law, human rights, culture, identity, politics, society, movements, economy, education, environment, architecture, linguistics, and conflict. Additionally, students are invited to submit abstracts on other topics.

Paper abstract submissions are due no later than Monday, January 10, 2011. Abstracts must be 250 words or less and submitted as a Microsoft Word document. Abstracts must be emailed to uamena@gmail.com and must include paper title, description, author name and affiliation (school and department), and contact information (phone number and email address). Notifications of acceptance will be sent out within three weeks of abstract submission. For further information, please visit www.nes.arizona.edu/mena/home or submit your inquiries to uamena@gmail.com.

Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes

Special issue of Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies

Guest Editors: Noor Al-Qasimi and Adi Kuntsman

Call for Papers

Digital media and cybercultures have long been explored as fields of identity formation, cultural contestations, and political tensions. Digital mediascapes have also been of particular interest to scholars of gender and sexuality for their potential to transform some gendered, racial, and sexual power structures while reaffirming, and often violently reinforcing, others. This special issue of Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies aims to bring feminist and queer analysis of media and communication technologies (the Internet, mobile phones, surveillance technologies, digital television, and telecommunication) to the field of the Middle East as both a geo-cultural space and a political entity.

Please send a bio and a 500-word abstract detailing the topic of your article, the overall context, your material, methodology, and theoretical argument by the 1st of February 2010 to qmecissue@googlemail.com. Authors will be notified by the 15th of February 2010 of the outcome of their submissions. If accepted, full papers should be submitted by the 1st of July 2010.

For more information, please visit the website.

 

Politics of Digital Media in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Editors: Helga Tawil-Souri (New York University) and Zala Volcic (University of Queensland)

We invite abstract submissions for an edited book on the creation, dissemination, interpretation, and role of digital media for political purposes in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Balkan and Middle East contexts provide interesting case studies because of their overlapping patterns of national and regional identification combined with the tensions these create.

The overall goal of the edited volume will be to consider the relationship between a wide array of internet uses and forms of political deliberation, taking into consideration both the ways in which interactive media help to foster deliberation, discussion, and the coordination of collection action, and the ways in which they may thwart public sphere ideals of rational critical deliberation and public accountability. Our intent is to provide an overview of the spectrum of political uses of new media in these two regions.

Contributors may come from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, attending to how political groups, practices, and communicative genres are underwritten and sustained via engagement with digital technology, as well as to how the political realm itself is transformed in the age of digital media.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

• The political uses of digital media
• The uses of digital media for purposes of organizing protest and dissent and for the construction of forums for political deliberation.
• How activists and (political) groups have used the internet to hold state authorities accountable or challenge them, or to publish and circulate information.
• The creation, dissemination and/or interpretation of digital media content by communities and individuals for political purposes
• The kinds of politics that are created/expressed in the digital media environment
• How mediated expressions and spaces connect to politics ‘on the ground’
• The kinds of political challenges that arise from digital media use in the regions
• The shifting relationship between digital media and journalism
• How population groups use the internet to connect with one another across national divisions (for example Serbs living in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro; Palestinians living in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria).
• Chapters may focus on different forms of digital media and spaces: internet cafes, social networking sites, bulletin boards, blogs, twitter, wikipedia, youTube, listservs, websites and other digital/social media.
• Chapters may focus on one national context or sub-context, or may be comparative in scope.
• For the purposes of this project, the relevant geographic range of the Balkans and the Middle East includes the following: Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen.
• We particularly welcome contributions from scholars from the relevant regions.

Please send a short bio, a publication list, and a 500 word abstract detailing the topic of your article, the overall context, your material, methodology, and theoretical argument by March 1, 2010. Authors will be notified by the 25th of March 2010 of the outcome of their submissions. If accepted, full papers, of a maximum of 6,000 words, should be submitted by September 1, 2010. Papers will then be reviewed individually by the editors and in the standard blind review process of the publisher.

Submissions and inquiries about this volume should be sent to both
helga@nyu.edu and z.volcic@uq.edu.au.