Center for International and Regional Studies

Cotton Queen | Film Screening and Panel Discussion
2026-01-26 18:30 - 21:00 (Asia/Qatar)
Join us for the screening of Cotton Queen, register below!

Register Here

Cotton Queen is a 2025 internationally co-produced drama written and directed by Suzi Mirgani in her feature directorial debut. Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, the film follows Nafisa, a young woman raised on her grandmother’s stories of resistance against British colonial rule. When a businessman arrives with a development scheme centered on genetically engineered cotton, Nafisa finds herself at the heart of a quiet but fierce power struggle that exposes the entanglements of land, memory, gender, and exploitation.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and has since received wide international acclaim, including the Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. With a haunting score by Amine Bouhafa and striking cinematography by Frida Marzouk, Cotton Queen is a powerful meditation on resistance, inheritance, and the cost of so-called progress.

CURA Research Workshop | Visualizing Your Research: Poster Design
2026-01-29 12:00 - 15:00
On 29 January 2026, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted a research skills workshop titled Visualizing Your Research: Poster Design Workshop. The workshop was facilitated by Sahar Mari, Senior Learning Engineer at Northwestern University in Qatar, and Sara Shaaban, Creative Director at VCU School of the Arts in Qatar. The workshop attracted students from Qatar Foundation partner universities, including Northwestern University in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar, enriching the experience through interdisciplinary exchange as participants applied these skills to their own research practices.

The session introduced participants to strategies for transforming complex research projects into clear, visually compelling posters that communicate a strong central message. The facilitators helped students understand how logos, ethos, and pathos shape not only written arguments but also visual presentations. Students analyzed sample posters through group discussions with smaller groups and with the facilitators to spot the strengths and weaknesses of each design. These exercises encouraged participants to reflect on how even the smallest design choices can influence credibility, logical flow, and audience engagement, which helped the students gain practical insight into the elements required to produce a visually strong and persuasive research poster.

The session then introduced what the facilitators referred to as the “Four Secret Weapons” of design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP). It emphasized how these principles work together to create a cohesive and clear visual structure that guides the viewer’s attention and strengthens overall communication. This resonated with many students, who recognized how these principles could immediately improve their work. The workshop concluded with dedicated time for students to work on the designs for their own research project and receive personalized feedback from the facilitators, ensuring the students leave the session equipped with both conceptual knowledge and practical skills to enhance their future research presentations.

Article by Mehek Elahi, CIRS Research Assistant.

CIRS Monthly Dialogue: Asian Migration in a Global Context
2026-02-23 08:00 - 17:00
This public panel brings together scholars to examine how migration categories are produced, governed, and contested within Asia and across transnational flows from the Global South to the Global North. Moving beyond fixed labels such as migrant, refugee, skilled worker, or trafficking victim, the discussion explores how state policies, visa regimes, and labor markets shape mobility in practice.

On February 9th, the Center for International and Regional Studies CIRS hosted a public panel featuring scholars from the workshop Rethinking Migration Categories from the Global South. The discussion brought together three panelists, Brenda Yeoh, Payal Banerjee, and Bina Fernandez, to examine how migration regimes classify, control, and at times constrain those who move across borders, with particular attention to perspectives from the Global South.

Brenda Yeoh opened by mapping the dominance of temporary migration regimes across Asia, where pathways to permanent residency or citizenship remain structurally inaccessible for low skilled workers. She critiqued Western centric paradigms in migration studies, highlighting how mechanisms like enclavisation and enclosure, the spatial segregation of migrants and the use of borders as instruments of discipline, function to contain rather than include. Her central provocation was this: how do states design systems explicitly not to integrate migrants, and how should scholars study migration not as states define it, but as migrants actually experience it?

Payal Banerjee drew on her research into Indian IT workers in the United States to examine the mechanics of status dependence, the way a migrant’s legal and economic existence becomes tethered to a single employer. This produces structural vulnerability, including precarious legal standing, limited labor mobility, and chronic anxiety. She connected these individual experiences to broader global asymmetries, arguing that employer sponsored visa regimes are not incidental but deliberate, and that the Indian tech sector’s deep reliance on Western markets reflects wider patterns in which Global South economies remain structurally dependent on Global North capital and labor demand.

Bina Fernandez challenged Eurocentric framings by repositioning Australia within the Asia Pacific region and introducing the concept of “uninvited migrants and settlers” to foreground colonial histories. She critiqued Australia’s offshore detention regime as a calculated deterrence strategy while also noting more hopeful developments, such as the Australia Tuvalu bilateral agreement offering climate linked mobility pathways. She identified three migration regimes deserving particular critical attention: forced deportation regimes, climate and disaster induced displacement, and statelessness.

The panel’s discussion surfaced several cross cutting themes. Participants examined how migration governance increasingly treats human movement as a problem to be managed, with administrative categories serving as tools of state control that generate waiting, anxiety, and unequal power. The rise of AI, biometrics, and surveillance technologies was described as double edged, enhancing border enforcement while also enabling migrants to build digital networks and transnational communities. Panelists also interrogated the politics of labeling itself, noting that categories like “refugee” or “skilled worker” carry colonial and racial histories, and that the global skills hierarchy reframes exclusion through the language of merit. Finally, feminist perspectives on social reproduction highlighted how migrant domestic workers effectively labor for two households simultaneously, with migration redistributing care work globally along gendered and racialized lines.

Article by Maryam Daud, CIRS administrative Assistant and Haala Qamar CIRS Student Assistant

Speakers:

Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA is Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Migration and Mobilities Cluster, at NUS’ Asia Research Institute. She was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize for outstanding achievements in Geography in 2021 for her contributions to migration and transnationalism studies. Her research interests in Asian migrations span themes including social reproduction and care migration; skilled migration and cosmopolitanism; and marriage migrants and cultural politics.

Bina Fernandez is Professor in Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. She obtained PhD and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford and has held academic positions at the University of Leeds, the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, the University of Oxford and the University of Oxford-Brookes. Bina’s research focuses on migration and social policy, analysed through the feminist lens of social reproduction. For over a decade, she has conducted multi-sited research on Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in the Middle East; key themes have been the conditions of work, the care needs of migrants, migrant mothers and their children at risk of statelessness. She has also undertaken research on Ethiopian refugees in Kenya and Australia. Current research on ‘Diaspora Humanitarians’ investigates the regenerative contributions of Australia-based migrant and refugee diasporas to the social reproduction of their homeland communities during times of crisis.

Payal Banerjee is Professor of Sociology at Smith College, USA. Her research focuses on the political economies of migration, globalization, and the role of policies in structuring labor incorporation, migrant categories, and status displacement. Banerjee’s work on Indian IT workers in the US has appeared in International Migration, Critical Sociology, Race, Gender, and Class, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Irish Journal of Anthropology, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Social & Public Policy Review, Man in India, and in several edited volumes. Banerjee’s publications on Chinese minorities in India have appeared in Security and Peace, China Report, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu (Overseas Chinese History Studies, in Mandarin), and in the book Doing Time with Nehru. As a Borders Studies Group member, she co-published India China: Rethinking Borders and Security. Banerjee served as a research fellow at the BRICS Policy Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and, taught at the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School in New York City, and in India at Sikkim University in Gangtok and at FLAME in Pune, as visiting faculty.

Moderator:

Waleed Ziad is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. His research interests lie at the intersection of social history, religious studies, and anthropology. Professor Ziad’s scholarship examines the historical and philosophical foundations of Muslim revivalism and mysticism in South and Central Asia and Iran. In this endeavor, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in over 140 towns across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. He is the author of Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard Press, 2021), which won the prestigious Albert Hourani Prize given by the Middle East Studies Association of North America as well as the American Institute for Pakistan Studies 2022 Book Prize. His most recent book In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022) builds on his long-standing research into numismatics and material culture of the Indo-Iranian borderlands. His forthcoming book, Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire: Bibi Sahiba and Her Sacred Networks (Harvard Press), is a continuation of his core research on the development of Sufi networks, spanning modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, India, China, and Russia. He has also written extensively on historical and ideological trends in the Muslim world, his work appearing in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, and The Hill.

CIRS Monthly Dialogue: What Arab Authoritarianism Tells Us About the World
2026-03-09 17:30 - 19:00
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This panel highlights contributions in the new Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Arab World, forthcoming open access from Bloomsbury Politics. The Handbook highlights the specificities of authoritarianism in the Arab world while placing the region in the context of global trends. The panel will feature Dana Al Kurd (Associate Professor at University of Richmond) Yasmeen Mekawy (Assistant Professor at Northwestern Qatar), Alexei Abrahams (Assistant Professor at HBKU), and Abdullah Al Arian (Associate Professor at GU-Q), moderated by Diana Buttu, to discuss trends in research on authoritarianism, emotions in the Arab Spring uprisings, and digital authoritarianism.

Moderator:

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer specializing in international law and human rights, returns to GU-Q as a Practitioner-in-Residence for the academic year. She will teach Palestine and the Law and Negotiation and Organizational Conflict, offering students a practitioner’s lens on diplomacy, accountability, and resistance. A former legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team and fellow at Stanford and Harvard, she is a frequent commentator on Palestine and international law in global media.

Speakers:

Dana El Kurd is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. She specializes in Palestinian and Arab politics, particularly on topics related to mobilization, public opinion, and international intervention. Her first book, titled Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, was published in January 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Global Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Democratization, as well as media outlets such as The Nation, Foreign Policy, Jewish Currents, Financial Times, and more. El Kurd is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as the Board of Directors of Jewish Currents.

Alexei Abrahams is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. His research examines information manipulation and cybersecurity using big data and social science methods, with a current focus on designing digital observatories to assess the health of media ecosystems. His work has appeared in journals including Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Political Science Research & Methods, and International Journal of Communication, and has informed reporting in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and CBC News.Previously, he served as Digital Lead for the Canadian Media Ecosystems Observatory at McGill University and held research fellowships at Harvard, the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and UC San Diego. He earned his PhD in Economics from Brown University and frequently consults for the World Bank.

Yasmeen Mekawy is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, specializing in the comparative politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Her research and teaching focus on social movements and revolution, digital media and popular culture, and the politics of emotion. She examines how emotions mobilize and demobilize collective action, and how affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution. affect circulates through social media and cultural forms. Her work has been published in Mediterranean Politics. She is currently working on her book project on the role of affect and emotion in the making and unmaking of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.

Abdullah Al-Arian is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar wherehe specializes in the modern Middle East and the study of Islamic social movements. He is theauthor of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, editor of Football inthe Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game and co-editor of the forthcoming GlobalHistories and Practices of Islamophobia. He is also editor of the Critical Currents in Islam pageon the Jadaliyya e-zine.

CIRS Book Talk: Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC by Maurice Jackson
2026-04-13 13:00 - 14:00
In Conversation with Professor Maurice Jackson

The book, set to be published next year, traces the struggles of African Americans for equality and human rights from 1780 to 2020. Through the history of Washington DC, it shows how Black lived experiences, political mobilization, and resistance mirror broader national struggles. By centering the city as both a symbolic and material site of power, the book tells the history of the United States through Black Washingtonians.

Maurice Jackson teaches in the History and African American Studies Departments and is Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown University. Before coming to academe, he worked as a longshoreman, shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, co-editor of African-Americans and the Haitian Revolution, of Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause,1754-1808 and DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. Jackson wrote the liner notes to the 2 jazz CDs by Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, Steal Away: Spirituals, Folks Songs and Hymns and Come Sunday. He has recently lectured in France, Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Qatar. He served on Georgetown University Slavery Working Group. A 2009 inductee into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame he was appointed by the Mayor and the DC Council as Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs (2013-16) and presented “An Analysis: African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” to the Mayor and elected leaders of the D.C. government in 2017. He is completing work on Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC to be published by Duke University Press. His next books will be We Knew No Other Way: The Many-Sided Struggle for Freedom and Black Radicalism: A Very Short Introduction.
