By Christian Junge. What are the social functions of reading literature? While many studies approach Arabic literature primarily through the lens of authors, the literary field, or sociopolitical discourses, my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research project, “Affective Readings”, shifts the focus to the readers. I ask: What do readers read, and how and why?
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“Gender, Sexuality, and Knowledge Production in Current Neoliberal and Authoritarian Regimes”: Call for Contributions to the Series
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
To highlight the ongoing struggles that shape the production and circulation of knowledge in times of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, the Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster of De Montfort University, the Margherita-von-Brentano Center of Freie Universität Berlin, and Academy in Exile are calling for blog contributions by scholars, students, and activists from across the globe.
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How the Values of Modernity Contribute to Cultural Mediation
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
Azelarabe Lahkim Bennani (Philosophy, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco). This paper aims to address how to invest the capacity of the university to shape dialogue between cultures in an era of multiculturalism and civilizational conflict.
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مساهمة قيَم الحداثة في الوساطة الثقافية
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
عزّ العرب لحكيم بنّاني (فلسفة، جامعة سيدي محمد بن عبد الله، المغرب). إنّ الهدف من هذه المقالة هو التطرّق إلى كيفية استثمار قدرة الجامعة على بلورة الحوار بين الثقافات في زمن التعدّدية الثقافية وصراع الحضارات. ونحن نعلم أنّ عددًا غير محدود من جمعيات المجتمع المدني والمؤسَّسات الدولية تتطرّق بكلّ جدّية إلى مثل هذا الحوار.
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Legba-figures and dzokawo: Unpacking a missionary collection from the Übersee-Museum Bremen
by editorial board •
In the debate about colonial collections in ethnological and other museums, little attention has been paid to things acquired by European missionaries during conversion practices. These things do not fit into the current discussions of looted art and are barely subject to demands for repatriation.
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On Contemporary Arab Philosophy as a Field of Study
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (Philosophy, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar). Modern and contemporary Arab intellectual history remains an understudied field. The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in it.
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في الفلسفة العربية المعاصرة بوصفها حقلًا للدراسة
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
إليزابيث سوزان كسّاب (الفلسفة، معهد الدوحة للدراسات العليا، قطر). لا يزال التاريخ الفكري العربي الحديث والمعاصر حقلًا يحتاج إلى درس. وقد شهد العقدان الماضيان اهتمامًا متزايدًا بهذا الأمر. ومن بين الأعمال التي ظهرت مؤخّرًا، ثمّة أعمال تراجع فترة النهضة (من منتصف القرن التاسع عشر إلى منتصف القرن العشرين) وأخرى توثّق على نحوٍ نقدي جدالاتها الأقرب عهدًا.
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The Allure of Airport Rhythms
by editorial board •
By Juan Miguel Leandro L. Quizon. Travel entails expectations, musings, and meanderings. The moment travelers make final confirmations of flight bookings, their minds begin to explore the countless possibilities of their new journey. However, this year reminded us how a pandemic can seize travel instantaneously.
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The Digital Humanities Interface – An Introduction
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Ninja Steinbach-Hüther and Thomas Efer. DH is the glue holding disjointed parts together or a bridge facilitating the exchange between separated regions of academia. We see DH as an interface, an enabler of communication and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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“Innovationitis” and Humanities
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Marko Demantowsky (History, University of Vienna, Austria). You read it everywhere. Everyone talks about it, always as a value in itself. We are all haunted by it, not least at universities, not least in the humanities, by the ubiquitous requirement to be innovative.
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هوس ’التجديد‘ والإنسانيات
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
ماركو ديمانتوفسكي (التاريخ، جامعة فيينا، النمسا) تقرؤونها في كلّ مكان. يتحدّث عنها الجميع، كقيمة في حدّ ذاتها على الدوام. تطاردنا جميعًا، لا سيّما في الجامعات، ولا سيّما في الإنسانيات، مُطالِبَةً بالمطلب كلّي الحضور أن نكون مجدِّدين. فالمشاريع التي لا تقتضي التجديد لن تحلّ عليها نعمة التمويل في نظام أكاديمي منتفخ ونحيل في آنٍ معًا.
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The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity and Sexuality
by editorial board •
By Ayşe Dayı and Hilal Alkan. The edited volume The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity and Sexuality illustrates and examines the various ways in which neoliberal modes of governing women’s bodies come together with religious, conservative, and authoritarian measures in contemporary Turkey.
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Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities
by editorial board •
By Katarzyna Puzon. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 – an event that triggered a significant and sustained rise in prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes against Muslims, which has increased steadily since then. The tragic developments that followed, especially the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, still reverberate across Europe, not least in the recent ‘refugee crises’.
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The African Refugee Equilibrium
by editorial board •
By George Njung. Africans‘ lack of knowledge about our own shared refugee experiences continues to fuel hate and discrimination on the continent. For far too long, the global refugee situation has been misconstrued as static, with certain parts of the globe generating disproportionate numbers of refugees and others perpetually faced with the burden of hosting displaced peoples.
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Palestine Potash Limited: Industrial Development in Mandatory Palestine and the Infrastructure of Zionism
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Mona Bieling. The British Mandate for Palestine was officially instated in 1923 by the League of Nations. From its beginning, the Mandate government received applications for the rights to exploit the mineral resources of the Dead Sea and its surrounding areas.
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Urban Parks in Late Ottoman Istanbul
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By Mustafa Emir Küçük. People have used green spaces for recreational purposes throughout history, yet the concept of the park as a designed green space for people’s recreation in the middle of the city developed on an international scale in the nineteenth century. In Istanbul, the construction of urban parks was one of the many urban infrastructural projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Spaces of Participation: Dynamics of Social and Political Change in the Arab World
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Randa Abou Bakr, Ulrike Freitag, and Sarah Jurkiewicz. The uprisings in the Arab region in late 2010 and early 2011 took many observers of the political scene by surprise, given the authoritarian nature of most regimes in the area. However, the roots and reflections of these uprisings can be found in the social, cultural, and artistic spheres of these locations, as we argue in our book, Spaces of Participation: Dynamics of Social and Political Change in the Arab World (Cairo, AUC Press 2021).
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Imagining the Telegraph in the Ottoman Empire
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Pauline Lewis. By the 1880s, approximately 20,000 miles of telegraph wires and cables stretched across the Ottoman Empire, circulating more than three million electrical messages each year. As scholars have convincingly shown, the technology offered a powerful new tool for the Ottoman central government to exert direct control over distant populations and provinces.
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Of Death and Dominion – Interview with Mohammed Bamyeh
by editorial board •
Mohammed Bamyeh’s 2007 book, Of Death and Dominion, was translated into German in 2020 and released by Turia + Kant. We spoke with the author about his research process, how death played out within historical power structures, and the role of mortality in contemporary society.
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Keeping the Wheels Turning at all Costs: Factories as COVID-19 Clusters – Interview with Aslı Odman
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
Recently, business have been trying hard to refute the role of the manufacturing sector as a main contributor of COVID-19 cases. In this conversation, Aslı Odman, an instructor at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and a founding member and volunteer at Istanbul Health and Safety Labor Watch, discusses the socio-spatial inequalities triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in industrial workspaces on both local and global scales.
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Urban Agriculture in Pre-Modern Istanbul
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By Ayşe Nur Akdal. Today, one can find it bizarre to come across a rural element in cities. However, historically, there was not a clear distinction between urban and rural. Agricultural and urban space existed together. Due to a lack of sufficient preservation and transportation technologies, easily perishable foods, such as dairy products and vegetables, were produced in urban areas. Istanbul was a good example with widespread and plentiful market gardens (2017; 11-18).
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Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo
by editorial board •
By Adam Mestyan. Some years ago I came across a fragmented, nineteenth-century Arabic manuscript in Cairo. The work, The Garden of Ismail’s Praise, caught my eye as one of a number of compositions written in praise of Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879), the “khedive”, or Ottoman governor, of Egypt.
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Missionary Anxiety Along Ottoman Istanbul’s Railways
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Gabriel Doyle. When new railway lines started to crisscross Ottoman territory at the end of the 19th century, the infrastructural change fuelled a missionary awakening. Catholic congregations, especially, were interested in the urban and rural areas around the Anatolian railway line, which started to be built in 1889 and intended to link Istanbul to Ankara.
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Ethnicity and the Use of Natural Resources in the Early Ottoman Peloponnese
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By Georgios C. Liakopoulos. The first extant Ottoman taxation cadastre of the Morea TT10-1/14662, dated 1460-63, divides the recorded settlements into Greek and Albanian on the basis of different rates of taxation, which favoured the latter ethnic group.
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Of ‘nimble fingers’ and ‘jacquard’s soldiers’: Up-scaling, Up-skilling, and the Re-masculinization of Labor in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Christian Strümpell and Hasan Ashraf. Bangladesh is widely known as having rapidly grown into one of the world’s major producers of ready-made garments. In 1978, it counted 9 factories; in 1985, their number stood at 598; and in 1996 at 2,353.
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Outside Looking in: On Teaching Art History from the ‘Margins’
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Hala Auji (Art History, American University of Beirut, Lebanon). What does it mean to teach art history, a discipline still rooted in eighteenth-century European Enlightenment ideals, in present-day Lebanon? As an art historian of the Middle East living and working in Beirut, teaching courses on the region has proven to be more challenging than one might imagine.
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‘النَظر من الخارج: في تدريس تاريخ الفنّ من ’الهوامش
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
هلا عوجي (تاريخ الفنّ، الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت، لبنان). ما الذي يعنيه في لبنان اليوم أن ندرّس تاريخ الفنّ، ذلك الفرع الذي لا يزال يضرب بجذوره في المُثُل العليا لعصر التنوير الأوروبي في القرن الثامن عشر؟ بصفتي مؤرخةً للفنّ في الشرق الأوسط أعيش وأعمل في بيروت، ثبت لي أنّ مساقات التدريس في المنطقة أكثر تحدّيًا مما تخيّلت.
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From War-Torn Europe to Colonial Africa
by editorial board •
By Alfred Tembo and Jochen Lingelbach. While World War II was ravaging Europe, thousands of Polish people found a safe haven in British colonial Africa. This forgotten history shows us that migration patterns are constantly changing.
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Where Intellectual and Environmental Histories Meet: Kashf al-ẓunūn and its Addenda as a Source for Ottoman Environmental History
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By M. Fatih Çalışır. Main themes of environmental history. Environmental history is a kind of history that seeks an understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time. As a relatively new field, it explores:
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History without Debate: A Reading of the Crisis in Arab Historiography
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Abdulhadi Alajmi (History, Kuwait University, Kuwait). Many universities in the Arab world, which annually publish thousands of theses, dissertations, academic articles and a numerous range of monographs, follow a common framework, which is the extensive collection of information.
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التاريخ بلا جدل: قراءة في أزمة الكتابة التاريخية العربية
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
عبد الهادي العجمي (تاريخ، جامعة الكويت، الكويت). الكثير من الجامعات التي تُصدِر في كلّ عامٍ آلافًا من الرسائل والأطروحات والمقالات العلمية والدراسات المتعدّدة والمختلفة، تتّبع إطارًا عامًا مشتركًا ألّا وهو الجمع الواسع للمعلومات، مشتركًا يفتقد لروح الجدل والفرضية. والحقيقة أن هذا المعطى التجريبي أصبح هو المنتج لاحقًا لما أسمّيه ’سلبية علم التاريخ‘ ولفقدان هذا الأخير لسمة التحليل النقدي والقدرة التنافسية في حيّز ومسار الفكر الثقافي والإنساني للمجتمعات العربية.
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“The workshops are seedbeds for degeneration”: Forms of Exposure and Protection of Workers’ Bodies in Vardar Macedonia
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Ivana Hadjievska. Between 1918 and 1941, Vardar Macedonia was the southernmost region in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It represented the Ottoman legacy in the kingdom, with its diversity of religions and ethnicities, and a population that predominantly subsisted on agriculture.
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Seasons of Capitalism: Human and Non-Human Nature in the Making of Lebanon’s Silk Industry
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By Graham Auman Pitts. Capitalism had it seasons in late-Ottoman Mount Lebanon. Each spring, the families that tilled orchards of mulberries purchased the eggs they needed on credit. Mulberry leaves nourished the eggs, which hatched and began to spin their cocoons once the temperature was reliably above 16° Celsius.
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The Strange Case of Portugal’s Returnees
by editorial board •
By Christoph Kalter. The year is 1975, and the footage comes from the Portuguese Red Cross. Who, or maybe what, are these people? Returnees or retornados is the term commonly assigned to more than half-a-million people, the vast majority of them white settlers from Angola and Mozambique, most of whom arrived in Lisbon in 1975.
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Humanities in Germany: Sciences Among Sciences
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Sabine Behrenbeck (Head of Department for Higher Education, German Council for Science and Humanities, Germany). There are many common problems and complaints regarding the humanities in anglophone nations and Germany, but there is also one important difference: In Germany the disciplines dealing with culture and language, religion and history are “sciences among sciences” (Wissenschaften unter Wissenschaften).
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الإنسانيات في ألمانيا: علومٌ بين العلوم
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
زابينه بيرنبيك (رئيسة قسم التعليم العالي، المجلس الألماني للعلوم والإنسانيات، ألمانيا). ثمّة كثير من المشكلات والشكاوى المشتركة المتعلّقة بالإنسانيات في البلدان الناطقة بالإنكليزية وفي ألمانيا، لكنّ هنالك أيضًا فارقًا مهمًّا: في ألمانيا، الفروع التخصّصية التي تُعنى بالثقافة واللغة والدين والتاريخ هي „علومٌ بين العلوم“ (Wissenschaften unter Wissenschaften). وما من تمييز بين ما يُسمّى „Geisteswissenschaften“ (العلوم الإنسانية) ومباحث أخرى من خلال تسميات خاصّة (مثل الإنسانيات أو الآداب الحرّة)، ولذلك يُنظَر إليها وتُعامَل على قدم المساواة لناحية اختيار الطلّاب أو المسارات الوظيفية أو تمويل الأبحاث.
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A Small Rift in the United States Regarding Palestine: A Shift in Rhetoric, But What About Foreign Policy?
by editorial board •
By Jeffrey G. Karam. For decades, the United States’ steadfast support for Israel has been one of the pillars of its foreign policy in the Middle East. This has allowed successive Israeli governments to act with impunity and evade accountability for crimes against Palestinians.
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The Fijeh Water Project and the Cholera Epidemic in 1903 Damascus
by Max Weber Stiftung •
By Benan Grams. On June 30th, 1903 Sultan Abdulhamid II approved a project to bring potable water to Damascus from the Ein el-Fijeh spring. The project was presented to the central government by Nazim Pasha, the governor of Syria, during a persistent cholera epidemic that afflicted Damascus throughout that year.
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Refugees and Religion
by editorial board •
By Birgit Meyer. The volume Refugees and Religion: Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories, co-edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer, disputes a hard and fast distinction between migrants and refugees by showing how shifting legal arrangements as well as people’s varying statuses make the concept of ‘refugee’ dynamic.
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The Humanities in the Age of Digital Information Exchange
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Amani Albedah (Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences). This contribution offers a preliminary perspective on the state of the humanities today, as knowledge production takes an unprecedented turn in human history.