About
A year-long series of workshops
NYU
2020/2021
Our present is defined not only by global uprising, but, even more decisively, by the open-endedness of global uprising.
This series takes the Middle East—a region arguably at the heart of the entanglement of policing and war—and the tenth anniversary of the Arab revolts as a springboard for a set of workshops around global uprising. We envisage these workshops as a series of open and incomplete conversations; not the presentation of finished ideas or work, but the thinking through together of a host of questions and ideas emerging from and responding to our present. To that end, each workshop will revolve around three speakers and a discussant.Instead of a traditional paper panel we invite speakers to each give ten-minute interventions that respond, from their own current work, to a set of questions and prompts. A discussant will respond in a way so as to mediate a wider conversation first between the participants and then with the larger audience
All of the events in these series are our attempt to address public programing in this moment of remote instruction and distance - but they were also built directly into the classroom.
This platform is the result of student group work through our required core course for incoming graduate students: Problems and Methods in Middle Eastern Studies.
We view this as a novel way for cohort building, a way to integrate asynchronous material into the classroom, and a unique opportunity to model public scholarship!
As Acting Director of NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies from May 2020 through the 2020/2021 academic year, Jared McCormick planned two yearlong series for a Center whose events and teaching had moved online: Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies, his alone, and Global Uprising, with Nasser Abourahme. Both were attempts to lean into what an event could be in that year, and to find new ways of producing knowledge: three ten-minute interventions by academics/practitioners and then an open conversation led by a discussant. Both were built into the required core course, Problems and Methods in Middle Eastern Studies, which McCormick and Abourahme taught that fall. Its students, in four groups, extended the events; their work became this site.
2020/2021
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Questions, corrections, and requests to use this material or to take it down: jaredmccormick@gmail.com.