After participating in the 2017 World Humanities Conference in Liege, Belgium, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) was invited to contribute to the World Humanities Report (WHR) and to produce the Arab Region component of the Report. Over 2020-2021, the ACSS mobilized scholars from across the region and beyond, to critically and creatively examine the themes, research methods, pedagogies, people, modes, and institutions involved in shaping and reshaping humanities knowledge in and about the region. The Arab Region report aims at critically understanding the landscape and impact of humanities knowledge creation on institutions, researchers, and publics. It describes and analyzes the institutions and infrastructures of knowledge production, the definition and reformulations of humanities fields, the intersections of research with society, the idea of the public good, and the ways in which innovative collaborations and new disciplines are emerging. Finally, given the realities of the region, the report also speaks to circumstances of crisis, urgency, and emergency, and the ways in which they impact both academic and public knowledge production.

Report for the Arab Region

The report consists of 25 rigorous, forward thinking, academic essays or thought- pieces commissioned specifically for this report as well as 26 case study profiles of organizations, collectives, platforms, and institutions working in the critical humanities in the Arab region. The case studies are drawn from a survey of such organizations we conducted in 2021. Neither the essays nor the case studies exhaust the themes or the actors engaged in reformulating the humanities and related fields in the region. The amount of energy and creativity expended toward more democratic and inclusive polities, in the face of persistent obstruction from above, cannot be overstated. This energy and creativity links research, activism, mobilization, and protest in significant ways. We hope that this report serves as a tribute, however modest and inadequate, to these efforts and the people behind them. We also aim for the report to serve as a launching pad for various other projects, to be curated by the ACSS, with the goal of capitalizing on the critical connections made between the work of individuals and organizations shaping the social sciences and humanities landscape in the region.

The Research

Arab Region

Report for the Arab Region

Essays

Essays

Introduction

Critical Humanities in the Arab Region: Trends and Futures

Layered Hegemonies, Academic Imaginaries

Arab Archives and Asian Histories

Border Crossings: Arab Humanities at Home and Abroad

Troubling South-South Solidarity

Alternative Archival Initiatives as Sites of Resistance

Self Tracing / استشفاف النفس

Deimperialization and Arab Thought

Law and the Humanities: Academic Impossibilities, Activist Necessities?

US Branch Campuses in the Gulf as Sites of Imperial and Decolonial Knowledge Production

Urgency and Temporality

A Critical Autoethnography of Teaching and Writing from Palestine

Researching Activism in “Dead Time”: Counter-politics and the Temporality of Failure in Lebanon

A Contested Terrain: Education in Emergencies Research

Witnessing the Emergence of Future Worlds: Ethnographic Research in Turbulent Times

Afterlives of the State: Reimagining National Belongings in Lebanon on Instagram

Reading in Time

Feminist Platforms

The Contribution of Islamic Feminists to the Production of Knowledge

Comix as Artivism: The Intersection between Art and Critique

On Feminist Platforms in the MENA Region: Experiments with New Terms and New Terms of Engagement

Revolutionary Gazes: Gender Politics in Contemporary Tunisian Film

Gender Studies in the Arab World: An NGO Phenomenon

Translating and Traveling Genres

So Vast the Prison: Contextualizing Prison Writings after 2011

Heroism Revisited: The Superhero Genre in Modern Arabic Culture

The Humanities in the Arab Digital Age

The Contemporary in Arabic Literature

The Humanities in Translation in the Arab World

Traveling Theory in Translation: An Arab “Travelogue” of Feminism and Gender

Urban Imaginaries and Landscapes

The City in Creative (Anticolonial) Imagination

The Urban Condition and Its Imaginaries: Perspectives from the Arab World

Beyond the Garbage Politics of Emergency: The Paradox of Infrastructural Failure in Beirut’s Peripheries

Case Studies

Case Study: Afro-Asian Futures Past

Case Study: The Anti-Racism Movement

Case Study: The Arab Council for the Social Sciences

Case Study: Arab Image Foundation

Case Study: Arab Media Lab

Case Study: Arab Studies Institute

Case Study: Beit Najmeddine

Case Study: Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences

Case Study: Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution

Case Study: The Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic

Case Study: Institute for Palestine Studies

Case Study: Khazaaen

Case Study: The Knowledge Workshop

Case Study: Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research

Case Study: Legal Agenda

Case Study: MADAR Network

Case Study: Mathqaf

Case Study: Mauzoun

Case Study: Nubian Geographic

Case Study: The Other Maps of Egypt

Case Study: Rehla

Case Study: Studio Urban

Case Study: Syria Untold

Case Study: Transat

Case Study: Women Memory Forum

Essays

Introduction

Critical Humanities in the Arab Region: Trends and Futures

Layered Hegemonies, Academic Imaginaries

Arab Archives and Asian Histories

Border Crossings: Arab Humanities at Home and Abroad

Troubling South-South Solidarity

Alternative Archival Initiatives as Sites of Resistance

Self Tracing / استشفاف النفس

Deimperialization and Arab Thought

Law and the Humanities: Academic Impossibilities, Activist Necessities?

US Branch Campuses in the Gulf as Sites of Imperial and Decolonial Knowledge Production

Urgency and Temporality

A Critical Autoethnography of Teaching and Writing from Palestine

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