Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

NYU Scandal Casts Light on Treatment of Workers in United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates has a long tradition of bringing in workers from other countries, particularly for construction jobs. Many come from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, among other countries. Some stay only until their job is done and send most of their wages back to their families in their home countries. Others bring their families with them and remain for generations. None of these immigrants, regardless of the length of their stay, are able to attain citizenship in the UAE, even though they now make up 85% of the population.

 

Workers' dormitory in Dubai. Photo by Neha Vora.

Recently, the New York Times investigated the treatment of those workers in the construction of NYU’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, and found that they live and work in shockingly poor conditions. Despite the labor protections set forth by NYU to their contractors in Abu Dhabi, many of these workers work 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, and can live with up to 14 other men in a room.  

 

The UAE’s disregard for the rights of its non-citizens is not new. In Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai’s Indian-dominated downtown to explore the lives of these “temporary guest workers”, who have flooded into the UAE since the 1970s. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, these workers are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. Vora notes, “Certain expatriates are welcomed into the UAE and governed through technologies and rhetorics of a free and open market that purportedly allows anyone to succeed if they perform neoliberal self-enterprising subjectivities, while others are deemed insignificant and invisible to the fabric of the city-state. ...Those who constitute exceptions to citizenship, like Indians in Dubai, are, by virtue of their exclusion, necessary to defining the parameters of citizenship and the legitimacy of the state. That is to say, their everyday practices, performances, and rhetorics actually prop up the citizen-noncitizen divide and the authoritarian patrimonial governance system through which they are regulated as outsiders.”

Interested in learning more? Impossible Citizens provides great information about the history of guest workers in the UAE. Check out the introduction here.

Enhanced Version of Iraq | Perspectives Available for iPad

We're very excited to announce that our first enhanced e-book is now available through Apple's iBookstore for the iPad. Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy's Iraq | Perspectives was a natural fit for the medium. The full-color photographs of Iraq during the war look beautiful on the iPad; with the black background of the iPad itself blending with the photos' black frames, viewers will feel as if they are in the humvee with Lowy. We have added audio to eight of the photos. Lowy tells readers where he was when he took the pictures and why he found the shot compelling. And best of all, though the printed book is $39.95, you can buy the iPad version for only $9.99. We hope you'll check it out.

Ousted Prime Minister on Greek economy

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou resigns today as the economic crisis in Greece continues to agitate European and global markets. Last year in the Mediterranean Quarterly, Papandreou assessed strategies for recovery in the eurozone, including government bailouts like the assistance that his successor is now tasked with securing from the European Union:
“It is essential to remember that it was not the public sector but the private financial sector — enabled by neoliberal governments —that caused the subprime bubble and speculative boom. And it was the bailouts and stimulus packages provided by governments that prevented the financial crisis from turning into another Great Depression. So it is only fair that the financial sector should bear some of the costs of the crisis, which was largely of its own making.” 
¾ George Papandreou in “A New Global Financial Architecture: Lessons from the Greek Crisis”

 Read the article for free here.

Mediterranean Quarterly on Libya

News outlets are reporting the as-yet unconfirmed death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi near his hometown of Sirte this morning. This could signal the end of Qaddafi’s forces in power, and victory for the Libyan uprising that has been ongoing since February 2011. 

For some background on the uprising, an article in the most recent issue of Mediterranean Quarterly, “Libya: Dream versus Reality,” gives a very accessible historical overview of the situation in Libya and what is at stake in the current struggle. The article explains that Libya emerged under United Nations auspices as a stillborn, failed state dependent on Western subventions, and that the civil war in which it is now embroiled was inevitable.

Read the article for free here.

Remembering Dicle Koğacioğlu

"The Other Effect,” the most recent issue of differences, is a tribute to the late scholar, Dicle Koğacioğlu, and her work.  The issue includes articles by Timothy Bewes, Lila Abu-Lughod, Ayse Parla, Leti Volpp, Z. Umut Turem, Elizabeth Polvinelli, and Koğacioğlu herself, with important new article on honor crimes, focused upon what she called the making of “the custom.”

Leti Volpp, Professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, reflects on Koğacioğlu’s life and work:

The legal sociologist Dicle Koğacioğlu was a brilliant scholar and feminist activist whose work on power, modernity, and bureaucratic forms of authority influenced many during her brief life.   Her work was deeply original, passionate, and critical, and spoke simultaneously to particular questions within Turkey and to broad theoretical debates.  A primary thread of Koğacioğlu’s writing, examined in complex contexts ranging from honor crimes, constitutional courts, to access to justice, was how public discourse on tradition always creates an “other.”  Her much cited article, “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey,” differences (2004), responded to a perceived increase in documentation of honor killings in Turkey by international organizations and nongovernmental organizations to show how these crimes are produced in relation to institutional practices and discourses of modern government.  Koğacioğlu argued that these institutions -- the Turkish state, Islamic parties, European Union, and the international media -- imagined as modern and standing outside of or in opposition to tradition, see tradition as an object of technical intervention, delimiting the universe of meaning through which these crimes can be understood, and removing attention from the way in which these very institutions participate in perpetuating these crimes.  Her article “Progress, Unity, and Democracy: Dissolving Political Parties in Turkey” in Law and Society (2004) examined the dissolution of Islamic and pro-Kurdish political parties by the Turkish Constitutional Court, assigned the task of dissolving anti-constitutional political parties.  Here Koğacioğlu showed that an arbitrary boundary between political and cultural domains was drawn by the Court, a boundary then used by the Court in the service of justifying its decision, as what may be harmless when an issue is cultural (use of the headscarf, the Kurdish language) may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state.   Koğacioğlu also published several works about access to justice in Turkey, looking in particular at interactions between citizens and legal authorities in the courthouse, the axes of power (class, gender) that operate in the legal system, as well as the negotiations by the disempowered who strategize within it.  At the time of her death, she was conducting research on Turkey’s justice system which promised to redefine the parameters of law and society scholarship in Turkey.   Her death is a stunning loss to feminist theory, to sociolegal scholarship, and to her many friends.

Israel Appoints First Openly Gay Judge

The Advocate featured an article on Monday announcing that Israel has appointed its first openly gay judge to Tel Aviv’s Labour Court.  Dori Spivak, a lawyer and the former chairman of Israel’s Association for Civil Rights, (ACRI), has been active in many gay-rights cases over the past 15 years. Many people hope that this appointment will be a sign of social change in Israel, particularly within the justice system.

A recent issue of GLQ, “Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine/Israel,” is an intervention in the debates about queer politics in this region of the Middle East.  The issue seeks to situate questions regarding LGBTQ rights, homophobia, and sexual policing in direct relation to questions concerning the colonial politics that currently define the relationship between Israel and its occupied Palestinian population.

Read the introduction for free here.

Guest Post: Abdeslam Maghraoui on the Roots of the Egyptian Protests

Today's post is by Abdeslam Maghraoui, Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, and author of Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936.

The mass protests across Egypt this week seem to be coalescing into an unwavering movement intent on toppling Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime.  The magnitude, momentum, and direction of the protests are similar to the movement that forced president Ben Ali to flee Tunisia in January.  Despite significant social and cultural differences, the movements in both countries are fueled by apprehension about endemic social problems and decades of oppressive, authoritarian rule.  Mubarak’s external support and domestic pockets of resistance may delay and influence change, but a revolutionary outcome seems to be already in the making.

    For one, Egypt’s social problems are in many ways worse than Tunisia’s.  Regardless of the scope and speed of unfolding events, Mubarak’s regime is unlikely to survive the challenge.  Thirty million out of Egypt’s 81 million inhabitants live on less than two dollars a day.  Seventy-five percent of the population is under the age of 30 and many are jobless college graduates.  Increasing inflation, high food prices, and stagnant salaries during the last decade have battered middle class families.  Millions of poor and middle class Egyptians juggle two or three different jobs to make ends meet.  According to recent World Bank figures, one-fifth of Egyptians live bellow the poverty line.  In the meantime, the country’s top political and economic elites, associated with the inner circles of power, lead luxurious life styles.  Cairo’s chic, Beverly Hills’ like neighborhoods stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the country. 

Authors on the Air

Need some smart conversation? We've got some author interviews for you. First check out Amitava Kumar, author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb and Nobody Does the Right Thing, discussing Islamophobia on The Nation's podcast and the politics of terror on Al-Jazeera's Riz Khan Show. Then, for something completely different, listen to jazz pianist Randy Weston on NPR's Talk of the Nation. He talks about his new autobiography, African Rhythms, and about the fiftieth anniversary of his landmark album Uhuru Afrika. He'll be celebrating the anniversary with a concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on November 13. Hope you enjoy hearing from these fascinating authors.