For a Sociology of Sectarianism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rima Majed
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Specific Research ◽  
Sociological Literature

This chapter offers an overview of the study of sectarianism in the Middle East. It argues that, because it has often been treated as an area studies topic, the study of sectarianism has long been absent from the mainstream sociological literature. By bridging between disciplinary knowledge production and the area-specific research agenda, this chapter proposes some conceptual and methodological notes to advance our understanding of the sectarian phenomenon in the Middle East. This chapter is a call for the development of a “sociology of sectarianism,” one that moves beyond Middle East exceptionalism to study the phenomenon of sectarianism in its complexity by locating it historically and analyzing it globally within the broader interlocking systems of social stratification.

Disidentification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Social

Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.

The Early Dynastic Near East

2020 ◽  
pp. 531-611
Author(s):  
Vitali Bartash
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Near East ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Early Dynastic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
City States ◽  
The Way

The Middle East in the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900–2300 BC) was characterized by the competition of local city states for hegemony. Combined with long-range military and diplomatic relationships, this led to the creation of the first, if short-lived, larger polities in Mesopotamia and Syria, which paved the way for the emergence of the Akkad state. Cuneiform archives of temples and palaces document a gradual concentration of land, power, and wealth in the hands of an elite that included the royal family and the members of the palace and temple administration, resulting in increasing social stratification and deepening inequality in the context of surplus economy, unprecedented urbanization, and endemic war.

Science and Sovietology: Bridging the Methods Gap in Soviet Foreign Policy Studies

1988 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
Domestic Sources ◽  
Science Departments

Specialists in the study of Soviet foreign policy increasingly feel torn between the positivist culture of political science departments and the holistic traditions of the Soviet area-studies programs. In fact, these approaches are largely complementary. Examples taken from literature on Soviet security policy and on the domestic sources of Soviet expansionism show how positivist theories and methods can be used to clarify holist (or traditionalist) arguments, to sharpen debates, to suggest more telling tests, and to invigorate the field's research agenda.

PHILIP HITTI, BRAZIL, AND THE DIASPORIC HISTORIES OF AREA STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tofik Karam
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Syrian Protestant College ◽  
The U.S

AbstractThis article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

Feminist Dilemmas: How to Talk About Gender-Based Violence in Relation to the Middle East?

2019 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-31
Author(s):  
Nadje Al-Ali
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Gender Based

The article charts my trajectories as a feminist activist/academic seeking to research, write and talk about gender-based violence in relation to the Middle East. More specifically, I am drawing on research and activism in relation to Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon to map the discursive, political and empirical challenges and complexities linked to scholarship and activism that is grounded in both feminist and anti-racist/anti-Islamophobic politics. While reflecting on my positionality, the article aims to challenge the binary of activism and academia as well as Western and Middle Eastern contexts in terms of knowledge production.

scholarly journals Capitalizing Asian Studies: Critical Scholarship and the Production of Knowledge in a Globalizing World

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Oakes
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Economic Globalization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Geographic Knowledge

This paper explores the implications of the related trends of economic globalization and the corporatization of higher education in the United States for Asian area studies scholarship. It argues that the scales at which geographical knowledge is produced are increasingly in flux due to the shift in global political economy. Area studies scholarship is subsequently left scrambling to both understand this shift and make its knowledge production somehow relevant and valuable in an arena in which knowledge about Asia is being produced and diffused from an increasingly diverse array of sources. In response, the paper suggests that more attention to the production of scale is needed if area studies scholars are to comprehend the changing relationship between our categories of geographic knowledge and global political economy.

(Not) Getting Religion: Has Political Science Lost Sight of Islam?

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sultan Tepe ◽  
Betul Demirkaya
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
North Africa ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Science Association

AbstractIn this analysis, we expand the debate on the place of religion in political science by using the predictions of Wald and Wilcox as our starting point. Following in their footsteps, we ask how political scientists have studied Islam since 2002 and identify the studies on Islam and Muslims at the flagship conference of the discipline, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. We evaluate not only the quantity but also the approaches employed by these studies. In order to gauge the balancing of roles (or lack thereof) between the discipline and area studies, we also take a closer look at the Middle East Studies Association, the largest association focused on the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic world and its annual meetings during the same period. Our findings suggest that, unless carefully addressed, the prevailing patterns are likely to result in a crippling knowledge gap among political scientists.

Understanding CSR Behaviors across the Middle East: A Review and a Research Agenda

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 14485
Author(s):  
Dima Jamali ◽  
Tanusree Jain ◽  
Georges Samara
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Research Agenda
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