MESA Presidential Panel: Middle East Studies and the Academy in the Time of Covid-19
Special Session 2-2, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, October 11 at 12:00 pm
Special Session Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique set of challenges for scholars and students of the Middle East and North Africa as it has for labor in the academy. This panel brings together scholars and activists to discuss the impact of the pandemic on the field and options for organizing available to faculty and students in a rapidly changing environment in the academy.
Presenter's Short Bios:
Anthony Alessandrini is Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and of Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of "Resistance Everywhere": The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. He has also published a poetry chapbook, Children Imitating Cormorants. He is on the faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, is a co-organizer of the International Solidarity Research Action Network (ISARN), and is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-Zine. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism is forthcoming in 2021.
Zachary Lockman has taught modern Middle Eastern history at New York University since 1995. His books include Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (2016); Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (2004); Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996); and (with Joel Beinin) Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (1987). He is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), chairs the wing of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom that deals with North America, and is a contributing editor of Middle East Report.
Setenay Shami has been the director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences since xxx and is formerly with the Social Science Research Council.
Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They received their MFA in Media
Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. They are currently a PhD candidate in
Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. In their dissertation, they theorize geographies of settler
innocence in Israel-Palestine. Their work is interdisciplinary and sits at the nexus of media studies,
cultural geography, and critical race theory.
Over the past months the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of many scholars, students and others involved in Middle East studies in the United States. Among other things it has exacerbated the difficulties that many in this and other academic fields were already experiencing in terms of their ability to pursue study and research, to travel, live and work in parts of the Middle East, and to secure academic employment. But these issues are also impacted by the severe challenges that higher education in the U.S. faces, the country’s deepening sociopolitical and economic crises, and the decline of American hegemony in the region on which this field focuses along with ongoing conflicts and struggles there. In the years ahead all these intersecting factors are likely to reshape the contours of this field, along with many others in the humanities and social sciences
“Cops off campus, COLA in my bank account” chanted the protesters demanding a Cost of
Living Adjustment (COLA) and for their institution, University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), to
disband university police. UCSC graduate student workers have been demanding a COLA to cope
with the skyrocketing cost of living and cost of rent in Santa Cruz since Fall 2019. In December,
UCSC graduate students went on a grading strike and in February on a teaching strike. COVID-19
obliterated in-person organizing and ended our picket line; but it advanced digital organizing across
all 10 University of California campuses. Now, a state-wide coalition of students, workers, and
faculty demands to get cops off of all of our campuses.
A global pandemic, brutal repression of non-violent protesters standing against racialized state violence, the shockingly exploitative system of academic labor falling apart before our eyes: it feel like the end of the world is here, but as Ayça Çubukçu insisted in a recent article, “Another End of the World of Possible.” Those of us in Middle East studies have been witness to a lot of apocalyptic scenarios over the past couple of decades: “shock and awe,” Operation Infinite Justice, Operation Cast Lead—even Turkey’s so-called “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria has a deeply dystopian, nightmarish ring to it. In this presentation, I hope to begin a discussion about how we can draw on this experience, as well as the field’s commitment to a critical internationalism, in order to bring our field out of its often-elite academic niche so that it can better inform ongoing popular struggles against racial capitalism, economic austerity, state violence, and climate change—against, that is, the end of the world.
Crowning a decade of revolutions, wars, protests and displacement, the year 2020 brought additional challenges to the Arab and Middle East region. What is the present and future of research in the region in light of these unfolding crises? How are research communities and institutions responding to heightened demands for new knowledge in a context of deteriorating infrastructures.
