Meet the 2016 Institute Participants[Logistical constraints require us to limit the number of overall participants and bring new participants in each year.]
Tory BrykalskiInstitution:
Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of California, Davis Dissertation Title: Cultivating Life: Agricultural Labor in the Bekaa Valley Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation research investigates the role agricultural labor plays in cultivating life in Syria and Lebanon. In particular, I focus on the so called “lost generation” of Syrian children employed in Lebanon’s potato and grape sectors (UNICEF 2013), and trace the practices, ways of thinking, and relationships in and through which they practice cultivation. Despite the often dangerous and exploitative conditions of their employment, my preliminary research suggests that these children are more than just “lost.” They are also self-consciously and explicitly planting, and, in so doing, making possible particular kinds of life, for themselves, their families, and the region more generally. By ethnographically examining children and their families’ daily experiences cultivating life in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I seek to explore the tensions between institutional efforts to produce and manage both children and agriculture as disciplined sites of a “secure” future and working children's efforts to attach meanings and values to life in exile. PhD Examination Fields: Agricultural Labor; Anthropology of Islam; Science and Technology Studies
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Co-Convener: Ziad Abu-RishZiad Abu-Rish is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University, where his undergraduate and graduate teaching center on the political, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East. Abu-Rish’s research interests focus on state formation, economic development, and social mobilization in the mid-twentieth-century Levant. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Making the Economy, Producing the State: Conflict and Institution Building in Early Independence Lebanon," which explores the changing nature of state management of the economy and the shifting patterns of alliances and conflicts that sought to shape that management. Abu-Rish earned his PhD from the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He serves on the editorial teams of the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine. He also directs the Arab Studies Institute's Lebanon Project. Abu-Rish's publications include "Garbage Politics" (Middle East Report, Winter 2015) and “Protests, Regime Stability, and State Formation in Jordan,” as well as two co-edited volumes: The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Critical Voices On and From the Middle East (Tadween Publishing, 2015).
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Co-Convener: Nadya SbaitiNadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She earned her MA in Arab Studies and her PhD in History from Georgetown University and specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Pedagogical Constituencies and Communities of Knowledge in Mandate Lebanon,” which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate. Her recent publications include “ A Massacre Without Precedent’”; “‘If the Devil Spoke French’: Strategies of Language and Learning in French Mandate Beirut,” and has written articles that guide researchers through Lebanon’s postwar archival terrain. Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects; colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums; the production of history as both discursive and material practice; tourism and heritage; and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows, and reality television). Sbaiti has taught introductory surveys of modern Middle Eastern history, courses on women and gender in the Middle East, the history of education, the Middle East and World War I, aspects of colonialism and nationalism, as well as nonwestern urban history. In addition, she is a co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal.
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