Month: February 2014

Call for Applications: APSA MENA Workshop in Amman, Jordan

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The American Political Science Association (APSA) is pleased to announce a call for applications from individuals who would like to participate in a summer workshop series that seeks to explain cross national variations in challenges to old regimes during the early stages of the Arab Spring Movements. The first one-week workshop will be hosted by Birzeit University and the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), from May 11-16, 2014, at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman. A follow-up workshop will be held at Lebanese American University in Beirut in September 2014. The organizers, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will cover all the costs of participation for up to 24 qualified applicants. The workshop will be conducted in English.

The deadline for applications is March 14, 2014. Program information and application instructions can be found online here.

The workshop is targeted at Ph.D. students and early career faculty. While the program primarily caters to political scientists, it is also open to scholars from any social science discipline undertaking research relevant to the workshop theme. By bringing together up to 20 scholars from the MENA region, as well as four advanced PhD students from US and European universities, the program aims to support political science research and teaching in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, and strengthen research networks linking US scholars with their colleagues overseas. The 2014 workshops will be the second series in APSA’s annual MENA Workshops program. The first MENA Workshop was held in February, 2014 at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

The 2014 workshops will be led by Denise DeGarmo (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, USA), Lourdes Habash (Birzeit University, Palestine), Fred H. Lawson (Mills College, USA), and Ghada alMadbouh (Birzeit University/PARC, Palestine). Participants will explore the dynamics of regime change, using the case studies of the Arab Spring as a topical empirical basis for this exploration. The goal of this program is to engage participants in proposing innovative research questions and deploying non-standard methodologies to enhance their studies of the Arab Spring and its implications concerning regime change.

American Political Science Association
1527 New Hampshire Ave, NW Washington, DC 20036-1206
Ph: (202) 483-2512
Fx: (202) 483-2657
E-Mail: menaworkshops@apsanet.org

Call for Papers: Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East

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Editors : Gholam Khiabany, Tarik Sabry, Helga Tawil-Souri

The aim of the Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is to direct attention to the multivalent and multi-local characteristics of knowledge production, media, and culture in the region. It highlights the necessity, once again, of the need and the possibilities of going beyond the false binaries, and of speaking with a ‘third voice’. It addresses key questions such as:

  • Is Middle Eastern Media Studies a periphery or should it be regarded as part of a wider project of (social) science of society?
  • Does it have a particular hermeneutics?
  • How do we address the particularities of the region while also considering broader socio-cultural and media shifts?

While challenging the provincialism of perceived ‘universal’ theory of media and society, this handbook also highlights the perceived ‘alternative’, i.e. militant particularism, which is just the flipside of the vacuous  universalism it deplores, rather than a genuine alternative to it.

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Summer 2014 Israel and Palestine Internship Program

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Students are invited to participate in George Mason University’s Summer 2014 Israel and Palestine Internship Program. Over 9 weeks, students participate in an intensive seminar on Israeli-Palestinian relations and spend two months working as full-time interns for either a Palestinian organization in the West Bank or an Israeli NGO in Israel. The program is open to undergraduate and graduate students and offers 9 undergraduate or 6 graduate credits in multiple disciplines.

Summer 2014 will be the 9th year since this unique program was founded. Dr. Yehuda Lukacs, Associate Provost for International Programs at George Mason University in the program’s director.

The internships are related to Conflict Resolution, Politics, Communication, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, International Relations, Human Rights, Sociology/Anthropology, Economics, or Business and Finance in Israel and Palestine.

Students can view more about the program by visiting the link below:
http://globaled.gmu.edu/programs/internships/israel&palestineintern.html

Application deadline:

March 7, 2014