scholarly journals Going Transnational: On Mainstreaming Middle East Gender Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liat Kozma

Middle East gender studies is a lively and fascinating field. With two very different journals (HawwaandJournal of Middle East Women Studies) and dozens of panels at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference and the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, we have come a long way over the last two decades. Women's, queer, and masculinity studies are now part of how we understand gender studies in the region. Middle East gender studies does, however, remain marginal in two fields—Middle East studiesandgender studies. It is normally assigned to the end of a Middle East studies conference (“and gender”), or, conversely, to the end of a gender studies conference or edited volume (“and elsewhere”). But can a discussion of technology or World War I in the modern Middle East weave in insights gained from gender or queer studies? And can a discussion of women's movements or women's labor incorporate what we know about the Middle East? I believe that more can be done to mainstream gender in Middle East studies, and to mainstream the Middle East in gender studies. Transnational history is a particularly promising direction for this endeavor.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum

The study of families and their histories opens up a cross-disciplinary dialogueamong anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, includingarea specialists. The content of Doumani’s edited book, Family Historyin the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, falls convincinglyinto such disciplines as history, anthropology, Middle East studies,women’s/gender studies, and Islamic studies, since the collection of articlesprovides various indepth case studies drawn both from Islam and frompolitical, economic, legal, and social perspectives.The anthology’s main theme suggests that the family is an entity that,along with the progression of history, evolves continuously. By reconstructingthe family histories of elites and ordinary people in the Middle East fromthe seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the book challenges prevailingassumptions about the monolithic “traditional” Middle Eastern familytype. Instead, it argues cogently that the structure and boundaries of thesefamilies have always been flexible and dynamic.The book is divided into four sections that explore issues concerningthe family from the perspective of politics, economics, and law. In the firstsection, “Family and Household,” Philippe Fargues, Tomoki Okawara, andMary Ann Fay analyze the structure of the nineteenth-century family andhousehold and illustrate how its formation was influenced by changes in the ...



2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Jonas Bergan Draege ◽  
Martin Lestra

We use quantitative content analysis to compare the academic publications and events of Gulf-funded Middle East research institutions in the uk to those that have not received such funding from a Middle Eastern donor. Our results provide some support for hypotheses about funding leading to a bias in the selection of research topics. We show that Gulf-funding of uk Middle East Studies research institutions is associated with less focus on democracy and human rights than non-funded comparable institutions. Moreover, we show that Gulf-funded institutions focus more on their donor countries than do non Gulf-funded institutions, but that they give more attention to issues of education and youth unemployment than issues of democracy, human rights, and gender equality when writing about their donor countries.



This chapter outlines the psychological or affective characterizations of diaspora in relation to gender. The chapter provides a brief literature review in gender studies and diaspora, including the concept of intersectionality. The chapter discusses the #MeToo movement in terms of women feeling like strangers in their own homes (or homelands) as well as from a traditional diasporic definition features ethnographical research in the form of interviews with Middle Eastern women who inhabit the Muslim diaspora in the United States. The interviews are used to highlight real-world experiences of diaspora and the affective impact of diaspora politics, and the building of diasporic networks.



2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.



It is in moments of great upheaval that societies may best be studied. Today, The North Africa and the Middle East region (MENA) finds itself in the most alarming state since World War I. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle East and North African History is a timely intervention to interrogate the region’s internal dynamics and take stock of its place in world politics. It illuminates afresh dominant historical currents as well as counter-currents that previous accounts have not given their due attention or have failed to notice. Broadly chronological, this volume combines thematic and country-based, multi-disciplinary analysis in order to reconsider half a century of scholarship and to critically examine the defining processes and structures of historical developments from Morocco to Iran and from Turkey to Yemen over the past two centuries.



1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabra J. Webber

Despite the physical proximity of the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, South Asia, to the Middle East and despite the convergent, colliding histories of these two regions, scholars of the Middle East attend very little to the Subaltern Studies project or to the work of Subaltern Studies groups. Although certain stances of Fanon and Said, with their focus on cultural strategies of domination and resistance, have a currency in Middle Eastern studies, no literary theorist, folklorist, anthropologist, political scientist or historian in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, so far as I am aware, explicitly draws upon Subaltern Studies with any consistency as an organizing principle for his or her studies. It is the Latin Americanists (and to a lesser degree Africanists) who have been most eager to build on South Asian Subaltern Studies to respond to Latin American (or subsanaran African) circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what Subaltern Studies might contribute to Middle Eastern studies if we were to make a sustained effort to apply and critique that body of literature.



2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164

Challenging students to identify and analyze diverse perspectives is a key objective in any Middle East studies course. This article describes an assignment used in a history course which asks students to compare and contrast articles from Middle Eastern online newspapers. Comparing multiple articles on the same topic exposes students to contrasting views on significant issues. The easy availability of online newspapers “de-centers” students’ perspectives by requiring use of materials from outside the United States. This assignment teaches specific analytical skills, such as finding relevant articles, reading them critically, writing effective summaries, and developing synthetic comparisons. Through an analysis of this assignment, this article discusses the advantages, as well as limitations, of this approach, using students’ own evaluations to assess the achievement of desired learning objectives.



2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Parks

As part of the Middle East Institute's commitment to promoting and advancing Middle East studies for the next generation, the Institute in late 2003 announced the Mrs. Harley Stevens Award for the best essay on a selected theme by a graduate student at a US University. The Award was named for Mrs. Harley C. Stevens, a longtime benefactor of the Institute and the Journal, who died last year. The theme chosen for the first competition was democratization in the Middle East, with the essayists encouraged to write on a single case study. Under the terms of the competition, the Editor of the Journal chose three judges to judge the entrants. The judges were Amy Hawthorne of the Carnegie Endowment, Nathan Brown of George Washington University, and Stephen Buck, former US Foreign Service Officer, also formerly with National Defense University. The judges chose as the winner of the competition Robert Parks of the University of Texas, who received his award at the Middle East Institute's Annual Conference in the fall. The winning essay appears here.



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