Join the Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University for an online conversation examining the social and spatial impacts of the regional war in Palestine and Lebanon.

The panelists, Lara Deeb, Elias Muhanna, and Ali H. Musleh will examine how the current violence intensifies the existing challenges that communities were already facing, as a result of past wars, conflict and systemic corruption. They will focus particularly on how communities and neighborhoods, across religious, ethnic, gender and class lines, are affected by the escalation of violence and displacement. What is the role of diasporic and global networks in advocating and supporting local communities? What role does the academy have in responding to the effects of violence in these impacted societies?

SPEAKERS
Lara Deeb is Laura Vausbinder Hockett Endowed Chair, and Professor of Anthropology and MENA Studies at Scripps College in the Claremont Consortium. Her most recent book, Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon was just published by Stanford University Press. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, Deeb is also the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2006), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013), co-author of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2015), and co-editor of the volume Practicing Sectarianism Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Elias Muhanna is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and History at Brown University, and director of the Center for Middle East Studies. He is a scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic history, and his essays and criticism appear regularly in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, where he is working on his manuscript To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? which explores the automation of settler colonial warfare. His forthcoming piece, “The Question of Genocide,” will be published in Social Text in December 2024.  

MODERATOR
Kathryn S. Poots is a sociologist based at Columbia's Middle East Institute and Center for the Study of Muslim Societies. Her publications include the monograph: Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain (Berghahn Publishers, Oxford and New York, 2005) and the edited volumes: Gender, Governance and Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).