Meet the 2019 Institute Participants
[Logistical constraints require us to limit the number of overall participants and bring new participants in each year.]
Lynn Abdouni
Institution:
College of Environment, The University of Georgia
Dissertation Title:
Applying Ecological Tools for Geospatial Analysis onto Transportation Planning in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
My research aims to develop two products. The first is a contemporary urban profile of the Beirut-Damascus transportation network. The second is a geospatial analysis process that can inform regional planning of cities and towns in direct contact with this Beirut-Damascus network. The goal is to craft a hybrid framework for regional planning that can overcome the lack of data availability without overlooking the particularities and needs of cities and towns of interest. On one hand, this research will decipher the physical script of urban clusters, drawing from the country’s history and its compound cultural profile, to classify this script into discrete characteristics. On the other hand, it will create a geospatial analysis process that can map the boundaries and patterns of urban settlements, incorporating landscape metrics into ecological habitat analysis models to understand connectivity and fragmentation of human habitats—in this case, cities and towns in Lebanon.
PhD Examination Fields:
Regional Urban Theory; Transportation Planning; Geospatial Analysis
College of Environment, The University of Georgia
Dissertation Title:
Applying Ecological Tools for Geospatial Analysis onto Transportation Planning in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
My research aims to develop two products. The first is a contemporary urban profile of the Beirut-Damascus transportation network. The second is a geospatial analysis process that can inform regional planning of cities and towns in direct contact with this Beirut-Damascus network. The goal is to craft a hybrid framework for regional planning that can overcome the lack of data availability without overlooking the particularities and needs of cities and towns of interest. On one hand, this research will decipher the physical script of urban clusters, drawing from the country’s history and its compound cultural profile, to classify this script into discrete characteristics. On the other hand, it will create a geospatial analysis process that can map the boundaries and patterns of urban settlements, incorporating landscape metrics into ecological habitat analysis models to understand connectivity and fragmentation of human habitats—in this case, cities and towns in Lebanon.
PhD Examination Fields:
Regional Urban Theory; Transportation Planning; Geospatial Analysis
Laura El Chemali
Institution:
Department of Political Science, Goeth University Frankfurt
Dissertation Title:
The Impact of the Syria Refugee Crisis on the Civil Society Sector in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation project explores the role of local civil society organizations (CSOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) that deal with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, particularly in light of the void left by the Lebanese state. Therein, I examine three central questions: How has the Syrian conflict affected the civil society landscape in Lebanon? How has the inflow of international aid affected the work of local CSOs? How has the relationship between CSOs and Lebanese state authorities changed at both the national and local levels.
PhD Examination Fields:
Political Science; Sociology; Refugee and Gender Studies
Department of Political Science, Goeth University Frankfurt
Dissertation Title:
The Impact of the Syria Refugee Crisis on the Civil Society Sector in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation project explores the role of local civil society organizations (CSOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) that deal with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, particularly in light of the void left by the Lebanese state. Therein, I examine three central questions: How has the Syrian conflict affected the civil society landscape in Lebanon? How has the inflow of international aid affected the work of local CSOs? How has the relationship between CSOs and Lebanese state authorities changed at both the national and local levels.
PhD Examination Fields:
Political Science; Sociology; Refugee and Gender Studies
Zachary Cuyler
Institution:
Departments of History and Middle East and Islamic Studies, New York University
Dissertation Title:
"A Better Life for Whom?" Oil, Political Economy, and the Terrain of Political Contestation in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation asks how oil produced the national scale and shaped the terrain of politics in Lebanon between the 1930s and 1970s. Lebanon was not an oil exporter, and its history is conventionally narrated as a failed national project undermined by sectarianism. Yet across this period, Lebanon represented a durable national space with a critical role in the global political economy of oil. Transnational oil pipelines crossed Lebanese territory, petroleum-powered trade made Lebanon into a regional commercial hub, and Gulf Arab petrodollars flowed into Beirut banks and real estate. This produced tremendous profits for elites, and created a built environment through which the Lebanese state asserted control over its territory and collected tax revenues. But it also created vulnerabilities through which labor and popular movements contested Lebanon’s unequal political economy. Using methods from environmental history, science and technology studies, and labor history, this project investigates how oil shaped politics in Lebanon. It aims to thereby extend scholarship on the political economy of oil outside of petroleum-exporting states, and to account for Lebanon’s persistence as a national space despite scholarly preoccupation with its supposed artificiality and fragility. It also aims to overcome methodological nationalism within both literatures through a necessarily transnational analysis.
PhD Examination Fields :
Modern Middle East History; Nature and Technology in Modern History
Departments of History and Middle East and Islamic Studies, New York University
Dissertation Title:
"A Better Life for Whom?" Oil, Political Economy, and the Terrain of Political Contestation in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation asks how oil produced the national scale and shaped the terrain of politics in Lebanon between the 1930s and 1970s. Lebanon was not an oil exporter, and its history is conventionally narrated as a failed national project undermined by sectarianism. Yet across this period, Lebanon represented a durable national space with a critical role in the global political economy of oil. Transnational oil pipelines crossed Lebanese territory, petroleum-powered trade made Lebanon into a regional commercial hub, and Gulf Arab petrodollars flowed into Beirut banks and real estate. This produced tremendous profits for elites, and created a built environment through which the Lebanese state asserted control over its territory and collected tax revenues. But it also created vulnerabilities through which labor and popular movements contested Lebanon’s unequal political economy. Using methods from environmental history, science and technology studies, and labor history, this project investigates how oil shaped politics in Lebanon. It aims to thereby extend scholarship on the political economy of oil outside of petroleum-exporting states, and to account for Lebanon’s persistence as a national space despite scholarly preoccupation with its supposed artificiality and fragility. It also aims to overcome methodological nationalism within both literatures through a necessarily transnational analysis.
PhD Examination Fields :
Modern Middle East History; Nature and Technology in Modern History
Roxanne Douglas
Institution:
Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University of Warwick
Dissertation Title:
Stories of Paradox and Exposure: Second Wave Arab Feminist Writing
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation identifies and characterizes the second wave of Arab feminist activity (SWAFA). To date there have been no attempts to periodize Arab feminist activity, nor ensconce it into a global narrative of feminist movements. This work therefore attempts to complicate the distinctions between Anglo- and Francophone feminist theories and Arab feminism. I posit that the SWAFA shares recognizable traits with the Second Wave movements of Europe and the United States due to colonialism. With a focus on literature from the Mashriq region (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine), I identify that SWAFA is a knowledge producing project which has a focus on recuperating suppressed female narratives, exposing the limits of language, and attempts to narrate the Arab feminine psyche. These similarities with other Second Wave feminist movements raise questions about how we make sense of these overlaps whilst honoring differences, and how can academics narrate this movement whilst avoiding imperial violence in knowledge production. This project draws upon internet activity, activism, theory and literature to answer these questions and illustrate the changing landscape of contemporary Arab feminism against a backdrop of globalization and postcolonial struggle.
PhD Examination Fields :
Modern Arabic Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Space and Place
Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University of Warwick
Dissertation Title:
Stories of Paradox and Exposure: Second Wave Arab Feminist Writing
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation identifies and characterizes the second wave of Arab feminist activity (SWAFA). To date there have been no attempts to periodize Arab feminist activity, nor ensconce it into a global narrative of feminist movements. This work therefore attempts to complicate the distinctions between Anglo- and Francophone feminist theories and Arab feminism. I posit that the SWAFA shares recognizable traits with the Second Wave movements of Europe and the United States due to colonialism. With a focus on literature from the Mashriq region (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine), I identify that SWAFA is a knowledge producing project which has a focus on recuperating suppressed female narratives, exposing the limits of language, and attempts to narrate the Arab feminine psyche. These similarities with other Second Wave feminist movements raise questions about how we make sense of these overlaps whilst honoring differences, and how can academics narrate this movement whilst avoiding imperial violence in knowledge production. This project draws upon internet activity, activism, theory and literature to answer these questions and illustrate the changing landscape of contemporary Arab feminism against a backdrop of globalization and postcolonial struggle.
PhD Examination Fields :
Modern Arabic Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Space and Place
Foroogh Farhang
Institution:
Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Dissertation Title:
The Traveling Dead: Syrians in Lebanon and the Political Economy of A Proper Death
Dissertation Abstract:
The eight years of Syrian civil war have featured a massive migration of Syrians fleeing their hometowns to Lebanon. As the first refugee community in Lebanon with no formal camps and cemeteries, Syrians have faced the stark challenges of securing one of the scarce number of burial sites and, further, holding a proper funeral for their dead. Faced with these overwhelming impediments, Syrians mobilize their scarce resources, (re)establish their networks of trust with the larger Syrian and Lebanese communities, seek formal and informal advice from governmental and non-governmental organizations, and engage in alternative, and at times illegal, modes of burials. My project takes the struggles of Syrians in Lebanon to bury their dead as its point of departure in order to explore the cultivation of new modes of collectivity and new understandings of life in times of indeterminacy and displacement. It asks: How do Syrians’ quests for a proper burial bring communities together, reconfigure Syrians’ senses of belonging and future aspirations and further shift the boundaries of legality within the national and transnational frameworks? This study attends to death to explore the ways in which people maintain and recreate a moral life while facing a daunting scarcity of physical and legal resources.
Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Dissertation Title:
The Traveling Dead: Syrians in Lebanon and the Political Economy of A Proper Death
Dissertation Abstract:
The eight years of Syrian civil war have featured a massive migration of Syrians fleeing their hometowns to Lebanon. As the first refugee community in Lebanon with no formal camps and cemeteries, Syrians have faced the stark challenges of securing one of the scarce number of burial sites and, further, holding a proper funeral for their dead. Faced with these overwhelming impediments, Syrians mobilize their scarce resources, (re)establish their networks of trust with the larger Syrian and Lebanese communities, seek formal and informal advice from governmental and non-governmental organizations, and engage in alternative, and at times illegal, modes of burials. My project takes the struggles of Syrians in Lebanon to bury their dead as its point of departure in order to explore the cultivation of new modes of collectivity and new understandings of life in times of indeterminacy and displacement. It asks: How do Syrians’ quests for a proper burial bring communities together, reconfigure Syrians’ senses of belonging and future aspirations and further shift the boundaries of legality within the national and transnational frameworks? This study attends to death to explore the ways in which people maintain and recreate a moral life while facing a daunting scarcity of physical and legal resources.
Zachary Karabatak
Institution:
Department of Government, Georgetown University
Dissertation Title:
Governing the Militia: Rebel Political-Military Fragmentation in Civil Wars
Dissertation Abstract:My dissertation explores the political-military relations of violent non-state actors as they attempt to defeat their adversaries. Although some conceptualize rebel groups as monolithic militant organizations, a significant number of these groups maintain political governance bodies unrelated to fighting. The relationship between these political organizations and their militias, however, varies. Why do some rebel militias choose to obey their political leaders, others defect from their political principals, while still others turn around and become the principals of their former political masters? What are the implications of this decision? I use case studies from the Lebanese Civil War to test two claims. First, different types of prewar associational life lead to different trajectories in the political-military relations of violent non-state actors. Second, variation in the political-military relations of violent non-state actors affects the strategies and effectiveness of their external supporters. To demonstrate that the dynamics I identify in the Lebanese Civil War are not exceptional, I leverage quantitative evidence from an original, global dataset of armed non-state actors.
PhD Examination Fields:
International Relations Theory; International Organization; International Security
Department of Government, Georgetown University
Dissertation Title:
Governing the Militia: Rebel Political-Military Fragmentation in Civil Wars
Dissertation Abstract:My dissertation explores the political-military relations of violent non-state actors as they attempt to defeat their adversaries. Although some conceptualize rebel groups as monolithic militant organizations, a significant number of these groups maintain political governance bodies unrelated to fighting. The relationship between these political organizations and their militias, however, varies. Why do some rebel militias choose to obey their political leaders, others defect from their political principals, while still others turn around and become the principals of their former political masters? What are the implications of this decision? I use case studies from the Lebanese Civil War to test two claims. First, different types of prewar associational life lead to different trajectories in the political-military relations of violent non-state actors. Second, variation in the political-military relations of violent non-state actors affects the strategies and effectiveness of their external supporters. To demonstrate that the dynamics I identify in the Lebanese Civil War are not exceptional, I leverage quantitative evidence from an original, global dataset of armed non-state actors.
PhD Examination Fields:
International Relations Theory; International Organization; International Security
Samuli Lähteenaho
Institution:
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki
Dissertation Title:
Locating the Beach: An Ethnography of the Politics of Coastline in Beirut
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of the coastline in the Lebanese capital Beirut. The study is inspired by lively discussion in the city around notions of public space, privatization of the coastline, and pollution of the sea. Starting from the beach, at the coastline, my research spreads out toward the sea and the city, into ethnographic encounters with diverse civil society groups, real estate business participants, and young people engaged in coastal cleanups or casual beach-going. The dissertation explores notions of public space in Lebanon especially in relation to the Beirut public beach, examines oceanic knowledge activism by young civil society actors, and looks at the littoral politics of waste and resortification. Tying together these threads of ethnographic exploration, through conceptual tools developed in the "Crosslocations - Rethinking Relative Location in the Mediterranean" research project, the dissertation examines how the coastline in Beirut attains for people a sense of location, of being, somewhere in particular.
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki
Dissertation Title:
Locating the Beach: An Ethnography of the Politics of Coastline in Beirut
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of the coastline in the Lebanese capital Beirut. The study is inspired by lively discussion in the city around notions of public space, privatization of the coastline, and pollution of the sea. Starting from the beach, at the coastline, my research spreads out toward the sea and the city, into ethnographic encounters with diverse civil society groups, real estate business participants, and young people engaged in coastal cleanups or casual beach-going. The dissertation explores notions of public space in Lebanon especially in relation to the Beirut public beach, examines oceanic knowledge activism by young civil society actors, and looks at the littoral politics of waste and resortification. Tying together these threads of ethnographic exploration, through conceptual tools developed in the "Crosslocations - Rethinking Relative Location in the Mediterranean" research project, the dissertation examines how the coastline in Beirut attains for people a sense of location, of being, somewhere in particular.
Natasha Pesaran
Institution:
Department of History, Columbia University
Dissertation Title:
The Third River: The Iraq-Mediterranean Oil Pipeline and Politics in the Middle East, 1920-1968
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation examines the history of the trans-desert pipeline system that exported Iraq's oil to European markets via the Mediterranean. Referred to as Iraq's "third river", the pipeline was built in 1935 by an international oil consortium, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), and ran from the oil fields of northern Iraq to two points on the coasts of Lebanon and Palestine, crossing the borders of five states. Existing studies of Iraq's oil development rarely consider the fact that oil infrastructure extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Placing the pipeline at the center of this study provides an alternate analytical lens through which to understand the history of oil in the Middle East. By tracing the history of the pipeline's construction during a period of colonial rule and its subsequent operation in the second half of the twentieth century, this dissertation examine the ways in which the material flows of Iraq's oil inscribed borders, transformed physical and social environments, and produced new political configurations. Rather than viewing the pipeline as a passive conduit for the delivery of oil and its transformation into revenues, this dissertation argues that the pipeline's structure and its fixity in space both reflected and shaped a set of shifting relationships between imperialism, nationalism, and the international oil industry.
PhD Examination Fields:
Modern Middle East History; British and French Empires; International Political Economy; Energy History
Department of History, Columbia University
Dissertation Title:
The Third River: The Iraq-Mediterranean Oil Pipeline and Politics in the Middle East, 1920-1968
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation examines the history of the trans-desert pipeline system that exported Iraq's oil to European markets via the Mediterranean. Referred to as Iraq's "third river", the pipeline was built in 1935 by an international oil consortium, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), and ran from the oil fields of northern Iraq to two points on the coasts of Lebanon and Palestine, crossing the borders of five states. Existing studies of Iraq's oil development rarely consider the fact that oil infrastructure extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Placing the pipeline at the center of this study provides an alternate analytical lens through which to understand the history of oil in the Middle East. By tracing the history of the pipeline's construction during a period of colonial rule and its subsequent operation in the second half of the twentieth century, this dissertation examine the ways in which the material flows of Iraq's oil inscribed borders, transformed physical and social environments, and produced new political configurations. Rather than viewing the pipeline as a passive conduit for the delivery of oil and its transformation into revenues, this dissertation argues that the pipeline's structure and its fixity in space both reflected and shaped a set of shifting relationships between imperialism, nationalism, and the international oil industry.
PhD Examination Fields:
Modern Middle East History; British and French Empires; International Political Economy; Energy History
Anna Reumert
Institution:
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Dissertation Title:
The Etiquette of Migration: Genealogies of Sudanese Labor in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation project explores the relationship between a contemporary migrant community and histories of labor mobility by examining how generations of Sudanese men become migrant workers in Beirut. What do men teach each other in migration, and for what do they strive? The project examines the relationship between migrant labor precarity and communal striving by exploring how Sudanese male migrant workers navigate the structures that condition their lives in Lebanon by forming intergenerational communities of care. I propose adab (“etiquette”) as a concept of practice and self-cultivation to address how Sudanese male migrants perform notions of morality, masculine propriety and material obligation, and how they are gendered through these practices of ethical, material and communal striving.
Through multi-sited ethnographic and oral historical research with Sudanese male migrants in Beirut and with migrant returnees in Khartoum, the project examines the material, affective and historical dimensions of male migration. By examining how migrants conduct a world for themselves amid structures of exclusion, the project intersects theories of anti-black racialization, gender and subjectivity. How do Sudanese navigate and reflect upon their positionality as precarious and racialized labor in Lebanon? How do notions of ethno-national belonging and ‘home’ factor into Sudanese migrants’ relations and kinship practices in Beirut?
In exploring how migrants form and sustain communities of belonging through labor mobility, the project maps a little-known yet significant transregional migrant route that traverses scales of belonging, connecting East Africa to the Arab Mediterranean.
PhD Examination Fields:
Race, Racialization, and Slavery; Gender and Labor
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Dissertation Title:
The Etiquette of Migration: Genealogies of Sudanese Labor in Lebanon
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation project explores the relationship between a contemporary migrant community and histories of labor mobility by examining how generations of Sudanese men become migrant workers in Beirut. What do men teach each other in migration, and for what do they strive? The project examines the relationship between migrant labor precarity and communal striving by exploring how Sudanese male migrant workers navigate the structures that condition their lives in Lebanon by forming intergenerational communities of care. I propose adab (“etiquette”) as a concept of practice and self-cultivation to address how Sudanese male migrants perform notions of morality, masculine propriety and material obligation, and how they are gendered through these practices of ethical, material and communal striving.
Through multi-sited ethnographic and oral historical research with Sudanese male migrants in Beirut and with migrant returnees in Khartoum, the project examines the material, affective and historical dimensions of male migration. By examining how migrants conduct a world for themselves amid structures of exclusion, the project intersects theories of anti-black racialization, gender and subjectivity. How do Sudanese navigate and reflect upon their positionality as precarious and racialized labor in Lebanon? How do notions of ethno-national belonging and ‘home’ factor into Sudanese migrants’ relations and kinship practices in Beirut?
In exploring how migrants form and sustain communities of belonging through labor mobility, the project maps a little-known yet significant transregional migrant route that traverses scales of belonging, connecting East Africa to the Arab Mediterranean.
PhD Examination Fields:
Race, Racialization, and Slavery; Gender and Labor
Co-Convener: Ziad Abu-Rish |
Co-Convener: Nadya Sbaiti |
Ziad 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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Nadya 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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