The Risk of Knowing

This chapter seeks to encourage reflection on the operation of the media in a democratic society. Its starting point is that the function of the press in a democracy is to inform the public in order to enable it to understand the nature of the politics and policies of those in power. It takes little effort to realize that this objective has little in common with the practices of the mainstream media, which in many cases have become a form of entertainment that successfully advocates its political conformism. In this respect, it contributes to deception and systematic disinformation campaigns that are designed to avoid public dissent and the risk of knowing.

Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East within and across Disciplines: A Survey of PhD Dissertations, 2000–2010

This chapter surveys topical, methodological, and geographic trends in the production of knowledge about the Middle East in doctoral dissertations written over the decade 2000–2010. It assesses the extent to which the post-9/11 political and academic climate influenced knowledge production about the Middle East. It argues that while scholarship on the Middle East has undoubtedly been both constrained and inspired by geopolitics and the various political, popular, and media responses to 9/11, the relationship between the two is not necessarily coherent, unilinear, or predictable. Trends in Middle East studies (MES) are the product of changes in political climate, methodological currents within disciplines (themselves related to shifts in the post-Cold War geopolitical order), the peculiarities and engagements of MES as a distinct disciplinel, and the relationship between area studies and wider disciplinary norms, organizations, and institutions.

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11: “Needs” and Challenges

This chapter explores trends in Arabic-language learning during years before and after 9/11 to shed light on the relationship between the federal government's pressing need for regional specialists and the ability of federally funded Title VI area studies centers to meet this demand. It combines data from the US Department of Education's Evaluation of Exchange, Language, International and Area Studies database with findings from qualitative research of six Title VI-funded Centers for Middle East Studies across the country to analyze course enrollment, attrition rates, language instructor status, and work placement of students after graduation. It argues that there is a disconnect between the government's need for proficient speakers of Middle Eastern languages and the ability of Title VI centers to produce them, particularly at the MA level.

Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East

This chapter examines how political science's complicities with the US empire would jibe with the two aspects of political science that are currently defining the discipline—the convergence, or perhaps more historically accurate, the continuing coalescence in new forms, of science and liberalism. It fleshes out those links while considering how scholarly convictions, combined with the realities of US foreign policy, have structured the terms in which the Middle East is studied today. The first section explores the discipline's seemingly contradictory commitments to value-neutrality and liberal values. The second section foregrounds the constitutive relationship between science, liberalism, and empire in the making of modern Middle Eastern politics as an area of academic inquiry.

Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national contexts. The book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council in New York, which began with examining Middle East studies and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. It is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.

Islamic Studies in US Universities

This chapter analyzes the locations and contexts for the development of Islamic studies in US universities. It attributes the field's growth in part to exaggerated concerns about national security. It criticizes the field's location within institutions, pointing out that across time—from the first departments of Oriental and Near Eastern studies to more recent interdisciplinary programs and departments—Islamic studies programs have been constrained by the field's institutionalization within the academy. The chapter traces the development of Islamic studies within various departments, such as Near Eastern languages and civilizations or religious studies. It suggests that the area studies framework can also impose constraints on Islamic studies if it is not attentive to issues that cross geographic boundaries, such as centuries-old migration in and out of the region, the transregional character of religious movements, and the importance of global communication.

Oil on the Waters? Middle East Studies and Economics for the Middle East

This chapter first reviews the reasons for the weak links between the fields of economics and Middle East studies (MES) in the United States. It then examines the growth of the economics profession and its work in the Middle East and the shaping of this work by international and regional organizations, especially the Middle East Economic Association and the Economic Research Forum for the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran. It concludes by considering the contested boundaries between economics and MES and how the political uprisings of 2011 were both affected by and affect the work of economists in the region, as painful economic reality and the contest of economic ideas quietly underlay the louder and more dramatic political turmoil of 2011–13.

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge

This chapter deplores the state of Middle East social sciences, which is described as demoralized, lacking academic freedom and reliable research data, and functioning in a general climate of repression, neglect, and isolation. Such conditions call into question the extent to which future social scientists will be able to build supportive scholarly communities or develop critical perspectives so key to social science research and the investigation of questions of public import. Echoing discussions in this volume on methodological shifts in the social science disciplines, it argues that the quantitative turn has produced a narrow, mechanical field unable to move forward in ways that attend to the diversity of the social and political world. As the field has emphasized technical skills over moral imperatives, and as the institutional contexts of US universities has changed, the result has been a simultaneous narrowing of the field and a projection of greater universalization for a global world.

The Interdisciplinary Spatial Turn and the Discipline of Geography in Middle East Studies

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the literature that constitutes the present spatial turn in Middle East studies (MES). This review has two aims: to examine the (often undertheorized or loosely defined) understandings of space at work in MES research and to explore the central or emerging research interests in MES developed by this spatial turn. The chapter then considers the theories of space discernible in research on the Middle East for many decades before the present spatial turn. It argues that not only does an interest in space have a far longer history in MES than recent critical research lets on, but that attention to this issue is important because it illuminates the ways in which evolving understandings of space accompany changing research agendas and, possibly, new theoretical, methodological, or conceptual assumptions in the interdisciplinary arena of MES more generally. Next, the chapter discusses questions of disciplinarity, particularly in relation to geography, and the ways in which disciplinary and institutional histories have shaped the contours of the spatial turn in Middle East area studies. It concludes by identifying new directions for research.

In the Shadow of Orientalism: The Historiography of US-Arab Relations

This chapter examines the historiography of US–Arab relations. It traces the attempted transformation of a discourse of American exceptionalism into a more critical postnationalist scholarship. At the same time, it reflects on the academic limits and political challenges of this attempted historiographical makeover. It argues that we are currently in a moment of major transformation toward a more critical, postnationalist approach that is more attentive to complexities within the United States and the region. This is a particularly strong trend in Middle East area studies as well as in the field of American studies. Not all work has moved in this direction, however. Many stereotypes persist in the framing of both places, positioning innocent America against the “inherent depravity” of Islam and the people and places of the Middle East. Such stereotypes are particularly persistent in popular culture and in books written for a general audience, as well as in some academic circles where the notion of a clash of civilizations or essentialist depictions of Arabs, Muslims, Islam, or the region endure.