CHICAGO WORKSHOP: February 24-26, 2006

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Shehr network, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

The Cultural Study of the Middle Eastern City: Politics, Practices and Representations.

Cities dominate the Middle East politically, administratively and demographically, and have constituted a distinct topos in area studies research in various forms (constituted by orientalist, modernization theory and more recently globalization paradigms). Currently, though, those working in and on the Middle Eastern city in the humanities and social sciences find themselves at a rather new juncture. The study of the Middle Eastern city, under regional conditions involving ecological degradation, occupation and war, neoliberal economic policy, de-regulated and de-nationalized media systems and continually accelerating migration between countryside and city, has never seemed quite so pressing. At the same time, the grasp of older paradigms seems to be waning. Perhaps as a consequence, the social scientific study of the Middle Eastern city has, over recent years, been turning to accounts of film, literature and music to grasp the complex imaginaries of city life that shape social process and practice. Humanities research (concerned, for example, with cosmopolitanism, urbanity, the mass mediation of music, film, the printed word) has, as in other areas of humanities research and writing, been increasingly engaged with social scientific accounts of nationalism, modernity and the public sphere.

This workshop will bring together a small group of scholars working in departments of anthropology, history, literature, music and film study, either already interested or potentially interested in one another's work, connected or otherwise to Middle East studies departments, to consider this interdisciplinary juncture, its challenges, pitfalls and opportunities. As well as coming from diverse disciplinary perspectives, participants will also reflect (on) the rather different conjunctures at play in different parts of the urban Middle East: North Africa, Turkish, Arab and Iranian world, diasporas in Europe and North America, and have been chosen accordingly.

Workshop discussions will engage some of the following questions. What are the effects of the making and un-making of public space and public life in Middle Eastern cities through the practice of religion (pilgrimage, festivity, daily practice, engagement with mass-media); through mass-mediation (film, television, radio, web); through the interactions of cosmopolitans, migrants and diasporas; through the practices and agencies of the state, both local and otherwise? To what extent do traditional humanities-based concerns with genre and form illuminate such processes of making and un-making, and to what extent do they hinder? To what extent might traditional social science habits of thought (the framing of historical continuities and ruptures, establishing forms of social and historical determination, the delineation of power and agency) need interrogation in the study of the contemporary modern middle eastern city? How might a category such as 'performance' cut across and illuminate traditional areas of social scientific and humanities based work on cities in the Middle East? How, and with what tools, to consider 'heritage'? What, ultimately, might 'culture' mean in this context, both as an object of study and a kind of method ('cultural study')? What does it enable, what does it constrain?

Program