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"Transcultural Identities: Solidaristic Action and Contemporary Arab Social Movements," was awarded three year grants through the 9th cycle of the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP). Through this project, we will explore the development of socio-cultural structures amidst political transformations taking place in the Arab world. Commenting on the project, Dr. Eid Mohamed, the lead primary investigator, said, "We will examine the interaction of political, religious and cultural factors in the development of an Arab identity at a challenging historical juncture facing the region. To accomplish this, our research will analyze contemporary works by Arab artists. Ultimately, we will produce our research outcomes in a book and academic journal entries as well as an online database that will document social movements resulting from the Arab Spring, which continue to influence contemporary Arab culture."

ProjectsTranscultural Identities: Solidaristic Action and

Contemporary Arab Social Movements

An estimated 366 million Arabs live in 22 countries in the Arab world, extending from North Africa to Western Asia. These countries share a common language and cultural heritage and yet differ in many significant ways. They may be Muslims, Christians,

Jews, agnostic, or atheists. They are rich, poor, and middle class. They may be socialist, nationalist, Islamist, or apolitical. As with all societies, dominant forces of class, gender, and racialized identities divide Arabs, but they still share a common cultural heritage and historical fate. They used to say Arabs write their books in Egypt, print it in Lebanon and read it in Iraq, and now it has been revealed they all take to the street in the Maghreb. How does one make sense of the politics of instability in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen? To what extent does regional contestation between Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia proliferate sectarian and tribal tension, reifying the chasm between Arab elites and masses? How can we complicate the construction of gender and national identities in the wake of the refugees’ influx to Lebanon and Jordan? The theoretical reconfiguration of Arab identities, in both singular and plural terms, assumes particularly acute sensibilities at traumatic moments of collective experiences such as we have been witnessing since 2011. As Arabs across all such divides face an uncertain future, they have inherited an expansive body of shared heritage. Our project, “Transcultural Identities: Solidaristic Action and Contemporary Arab Social Movements,” offers a nuanced and multi-faceted response to such disparate questions by proposing an interdisciplinary reading of socio-cultural formations at the center of political transformation in the Arab world. Our collaboration captures the interplay of politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs’ search for more stable governing models at crossroads of global, regional, and national challenges through systematic and integrated analyses of evolving and contested Arab visual, literary, and performing arts, including media (traditional and alternative), in revolutionary and unstable public spheres. Our project pays a particular interest to graphic novels and comic books as an emerging subgenre in Arabic literature particularly during and after the Arab Spring. The central research questions for this project are: How do new

media, film and literary or artistic forms of expression inform and echo currents of transformation in the Arab world? Moreover, how do such forms theorize “transcultural identity” as a form of citizen engagement at the center of transformation politics in the Arab world? This project presents a unique attempt to investigate these forms of cultural productions as new modes of knowledge that shed light on the nature of social movements with the aim of expanding the critical reach of the disciplinary methods of political discourse and social theory. The project will seek to articulate systemically the ways in which the Arab scene can contribute to the understanding of the rise of new social movements worldwide by exploring the methodological gaps in the dominant Western discourse and theories. As theorists such as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek have confirmed, such methodological gaps became very clear in the failure to understand the irreducible heterogeneity of the crowds, the subsequent transformations in the public sphere and the modes of social mobilization. Instead of a single case study or a single-minded methodological approach, this research effort innovatively deploys the collaborative research expertise of a number of scholars from different disciplinary traditions to examine the articulations of these Arab transcultural identities, collective action and social movements in current political contexts. It employs multi-methods including narrative interviews, participant observations, archival work and content analysis (including text and visual materials). While the project casts a comparative look at the major hubs of Arab revolutionary momentums in specific Arab countries—from Tunisia to Egypt and Yemen, in addition to Lebanon, and Jordan—it will highlight the role of Qatar-based research in contributing to the increasing demand for a richer, deeper and more comparative understanding of Arab states and societies. The clusters of countries we will examine are selected predicated on particular phenomena each country has thematically entailed. They are not selected because

of any geographical import but as nodes of research that will allow us methodologically to go beyond national boundaries, while helping understand the specificity of local developments geared towards an unprecedented theoretical inroad to comparative historical sociology of nations. The project will also provide high quality deliverables in the theoretical reconfiguration of Arab identities including a monograph titled, “Transcultural Identities: Solidaristic Action and Contemporary Arab Social Movements,” diverse academic articles and contributions in two special issues of refereed journals, roundtable discussions, and an online searchable repository for future research. We already received letters of interest for publishing our deliverables from Cambridge University Press and Palgrave McMillian. This is in addition to a PhD thesis that will be transformed into a book which will be published at the end of the project’s period of performance. The post-doctoral fellow will work on how literary and cultural production becomes possible outside of paradigms of the nation and national imaginaries that set the parameters for exclusion and inclusion.

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

Graduate Research Seminar at DI

This Graduate Research Seminar Series will be enriched by the multiple conversations among graduate students with mentors and other faculty involved in our research project. The aim of the seminar is to raise questions and address problems that face all of us involved in interdisciplinary research. These questions will rise out of particular research problems, but our aim is to generalize these issues so our own graduate students might join together in addressing such problems as the evolution of academic disciplines or the nature of historical methods. Core readings in theory and methods provide some of the common ground for each seminar; but discussion of current and on-going projects will allow the interrogation of such widely shared concerns. Our own experience in research methods courses from multiple programs is valuable in guiding the initial

formation of our Seminar for the Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Inevitably this seminar will take on a life of its own informed by the research interests of the individual members of the seminar.

Running such a seminar is a challenging and invaluable important experience for our own graduate students who join in this effort. There has been much discussion of the role of theory in contemporary literary and cultural studies programs both at DI and in other universities, and this part of our QNRF NPRP research project is a sustained effort at DI to have our graduate students address the issues of theory and method as a group and across the humanities and the social sciences.

In these 2-hour seminars, a guest speaker will (1) present an overview of a specific research method that he or she utilize and, if possible, (2) lead the group in an interactive component to the seminar where the seminar participants will spend time performing a practical element of this method.

Research methods courses from multiple departments will be highlighted throughout the semester for students looking for further depth of instruction in specific areas.

Upon successful completion of this seminar, the student will acquire an• An exposure to a variety of research methods used for interdisciplinary research• Ability to identify key resources in the literature in order to further investigate research methods for conducting interdisciplinary research 1-   First Graduate Seminar with Prof. Hamid Dabashi from Columbia University who discussed the representation of the Arab word by the West in politics, literature, in social sciences. The impact of the Arab spring on how the West and the Arab world see each other. The need Arabs feel to change the way they think about themselves and the norms and concepts they use. 2-    Second Graduate Seminar with Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat who made a presentation on the challenges we are facing in social sciences and where they come from before and after the Arab Spring.3-    Third Graduate Seminar with Prof. Nathan Brown from George Washington University. In this Seminar Dr. Brown will address how political science approaches the Middle East and questions of democracy and authoritarianism

4 – Fourth Graduate Seminar with Dr. Mohamed ElNawawy and Dr. Mohamad Hamas from the Doha Institute. They will present their research on the US media coverage of the Black lives matter movement and talk about the methods of content analysis.

In January 10 we will have a full day workshop by Prof. Melani McAlister from George Washington University who will do it in person at DI campus

McAlister Graduate WorkshopTitle: Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract:This workshop will discuss two topics that are central to scholarly conversations today. First we will examine the debate in the fields of history, international relations, and cultural studies over the best methods for doing transnational scholarship. Second we will explore what arguments scholars make about the politics of popular culture and media, examining questions about what popular culture can, and cannot, tell us about politics and society. We will read several state-of-the-field articles,

Melani McAlister Bio:Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East (Univ. of California, 2005, o. 2001). She is co-editor, with R. Marie Griffith, of Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Unite States (2008). She has recently completed Our God in the World: The Global Visions of American Evangelicals, an expansive study of evangelical internationalism since 1960. McAlister is beginning work on a study of religion and transnational politics, tentatively titled: “’Let Biafra Live!’: Religion, Global Media, and Transnational Humanitarianism during Nigeria’s Civil War, 1967-1970.”

McAlister has published in a broad range of academic and general interest publications, including the New York Times and Washington Post. She has received fellowships from Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. She has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and Diplomatic History, and was a member of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom from 2010-2015. She currently serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

PUBLIC TALKS & ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS

The development of our project theoretical framework

necessitates a variety of scholarly engagements that will enhance Doha as a primary site for Arab knowledge mobilization. The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies will host the residency of the participating researchers, who will contribute to the project while enriching the academic engagement in the country through a series of monthly public talks. The Institute will also host monthly roundtable discussions for recognized scholars from Qatari, North American, European, and Middle Eastern institutions to reflect on the project’s multiple clusters and themes. MONTHLY PUBLIC TALKS 1 – Our speaker for the November public talk was Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat on the evolution of the idea of citizenship.2 – The December public talk will host Prof. Hamid Dabashi from Columbia University on "Perils and Promises of Identity Politics: Arabs and Americans in a Time of Trump" December 25 at 7 PM

PROJECT WEBSITE

To disseminate findings of this project in a novel and up-to-date manner, we are building a website that is open to the public, academics, journalists, and others on Arab Spring cultural initiatives. This will provide a running update on the progress achieved in examining the research questions and will assist in getting research findings into the wider public domain. This will be a place to also embed media interviews on the research project, blogs, and op-eds that we publish as well. S/he will help to maintain this website, by uploading documents, and

most importantly, by using twitter to notify in interested public about the latest findings.

Research Team

Research Project LPI

Eid Mohamed

Eid Mohamed is Assistant Professor of Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies at the Comparative Literature Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Before joining the DI, Dr. Mohamed has been an adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, an academic consultant and a lecturer of Arab Studies at Renison College as well as a research fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Dr. Mohamed served also as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the State University of New York in Binghamton and as a Joint Fellow at Brookings Doha Center and Qatar University.

Dr. Mohamed's teaching and research are chiefly cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, dealing with society vs. culture, and text vs. visuality. Dr. Mohamed has authored and co-edited many books including: Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East, I.B. Tauris (2015), Who Defines Me: Negotiating Identity in Language and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2014), Education and the Arab Spring: Shifting Towards Democracy, Netherlands: Sense Publishers (2015), Tahrir

Square and Beyond: Critical Perspectives On Politics, Law and Security, Indiana University Press (2015), and From the American Fall to the Arab Spring: Transcultural Identities in a Changing World (manuscript in process).

Research Project PIs

Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities.

Professor Dabashi has written twenty-five books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.

His books include Authority in Islam [1989]; Theology of Discontent [1993]; Truth and Narrative [1999]; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future [2001]; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran [2000]; Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema [2007]; Iran: A People Interrupted [2007]; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema[2006]. His most recent work includes Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (2012), The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012) and Being A Muslim in the World (2013).

Ayman A El-Desouky

Ayman A El-Desouky is an Associate Professor of Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature. He studied English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo and the University of Texas in Austin. El-Desouky has been lecturing in Arabic and Comparative Literature since 2002 and was the Founding Chair of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at CCLPS from 2009-2012 as well as being co-founder of a pioneering program in Global English Literary Studies (launched in 2014) at SOAS, the University of London. In 1993 to 1995, he lectured on World Literature and American Literature at the University of Texas in Austin and from 1995 to 1996, he lectured on Arabic Language and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, where he also founded a new program in Arabic Language and Literature

there and at Harvard University (1996-2002). El-Desouky is a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and has lectured widely on Hermeneutics, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East. 

His most recent publications include: "The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); "Between Hermeneutic Provenance and Textuality: The Qur'an and the Question of Method in Approaches to World Literature", Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 16.3 (2014); "Beyond Spatiality: Theorizing the Local and Untranslatability as Comparative Critical Method", in Joachim Küpper, ed., "Approaches to World Literature", Volume 1 WeltLiteraturen/World Literatures Series (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013); "Heterologies of Revolutionary Action: On Historical Consciousness and the Sacred in Mahfouz's "Children of the Alley", Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.4 (September 2011) and "Ego Eimi: Kerygma or Existential Metaphor? Frye, Bultmann and the Problem of Demythologizing", Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 34.2 (June 2007). He is currently preparing a long monograph on "Figuring the Sacred in the Modern Arabic Novel" for Edinburgh University Press.

Aziz Douai

Aziz Douai is Associate Professor and Head of the Media and Cultural Studies Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate

Studies. He has taught communication and media studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Franklin University, and the University of Ontario. Dr. Douai specializes in international communications including global media and international politics/conflict, media coverage of terrorism, as well as new communication technologies and social change. He is the co-editor of New media influence on social and political change in Africa (IGI-Global, 2013), and the managing editor of the American Communication Journal. Dr. Douai is currently co-editing a book on the shifting landscape of new media in the Arab world after the “Arab Spring” upheavals. 

Barkuzar Dubbati

Barkuzar Dubbati is assistant professor at the English Language and Literature Department, University of Jordan.

Waleed F. Mahdi

Waleed F. Mahdi is joining the University of Oklahoma for an

assistant professor joint position in the Department of International and Area Studies and the Department of Modern Languages, Literature, and Linguistics. He is a comparatist with research and teaching interests in US-Arab and Muslim cultural politics. His current book project explores the visual representations of Arab Americans in Hollywood and Arab filmmaking. He is also developing another research project around the cultural articulations of the Yemeni contemporary political transformation.

Research Project Consultants

Asef Bayat

Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, Bayat taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In the meantime, he had visiting

positions at the Universality of California, Berkeley, Colombia University, Oxford, and Brown.  

Khaled Fahmy

Khaled Fahmy is professor and chair of AUC’s Department of History. After graduating from AUC with a bachelor’s in economics and a master’s in political science, Fahmy went on to pursue a DPhil from Oxford University. A renowned expert in Middle East studies, Fahmy served as associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University (NYU) before joining AUC as a faculty member. A Fulbright scholar, Fahmy’s academic contributions have earned him a series of fellowships and honors including the Malcolm Kerr Awards of the Middle East Studies Association for best humanities dissertation (honorable mention) in 1993. Fahmy was also appointed as a faculty fellow from 2000 to 2001 in the Project on Cities and Urban Knowledge, as part of NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies. 

Fahmy is a member of the Middle East Studies Association, Egyptian Historical Association and American Historical Association. A prolific writer, Fahmy authored several publications including Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009); All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali Pasha, His Army and the Founding of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and The Body

and Modernity: Essays in the History of Medicine and Law in Modern Egypt (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 2004).

Partner Institutions

Columbia University

Founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the State of New York. For more than 250 years, Columbia has been a leader in higher education in the nation and around the world. At the core of its wide range of academic inquiry is the commitment to attract and engage the best minds in pursuit of greater human understanding, pioneering new discoveries and service to society.

University of Oklahoma

Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university in Norman, Oklahoma with programs as diverse as its students. It is a doctoral degree-granting institution serving the educational, cultural, economic, and healthcare needs of the state, region, and nation. The university’s global mission is to utilize its intellectual, technological, and administrative resources for the generation and dissemination of new knowledge to

understand and improve all aspects of life and living.

The University of Jordan

The University of Jordan is both a modern as well as old institution of Higher Education in Jordan. Established in 1962, the University has, since then, applied itself to the advancement of knowledge no less than to its dissemination. In its capacity as a comprehensive teaching, research and community-service institution.

Amel Boubekeur

Amel Boubekeur is a researcher at the Grenoble Université Pierre-Mendès in Grenoble and is research associate at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Her research focuses on Maghreb country politics, democratization in the Arab world, Euro-Arab/US–Arab relations, and Islam in Europe. She has been a research associate the Centre Jacques Berque, a non-resident fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP-Berlin), a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, the head of

the Islam and Europe Programme at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and a research fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales - École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She is the author of "Whatever Happened to the Islamists?," "European Islam: The Challenges for Society and Public Policy," and "Le voile de la mariée".

Talaat Farrag

Talaat Farrag is a lecturer of English Language and Literature. With a Ph.D. in comparative postcolonial poetry and criticism, and

an M.A. in Romantic Poetry, Dr. Farrag’s teaching and research fields are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, involving the interplay of literature, culture, religion and translation in

postcolonial studies. A lecturer of English language and literature, Dr. Farrag is currently conducting research on the modes of

resistance in postcolonial poetry, literature and Occidentalism, and literary translation. His research works include “Counter-

Orientalism in Robert Southey’s Poetry”, “Postcolonial Resistance in a Religio-Cultural Arab Context: A counter-discursive reading”, “The poetics of Resistance in the Works of Badr Shakir As-Sayyab and Derek Walcott: A Post-colonial Reading” and “(Un)Requited

love in Jahili and early Islamic poetry”.

Majd Hamad

Majd Hamad is an MA student in Comparative Literature program. She is the Media Research assistant in this project. Graduated from Birzeit University – Palestine, with a BA degree in Radio and Television Broadcasting.

Asmaa Essakouti

Asmaa Essakouti is an MAstudent in Comparative Literature at Doha institute. She holds a master degree in Arabic literature, from Moulay Smail University, in the topic of "Metafiction and question of pleasure".Fields of research: narration, semantics, novel