Center for International and Regional Studies

Activism in Exile: Diasporic Communities in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings
2021-09-30 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
The Arab uprisings, which saw the mobilization of millions of citizens across the Middle East and North Africa, produced new exiled communities at a massive scale. Refugees made their way to countries all over the world, escaping economic pressures, political repression and state violence. In host countries, the new (and old) diasporic communities have often exercised what scholars define as “voice after exit.” Enabling conditions in the host state can allow for new forms of social and political mobilization and solidarity-building that are difficult to achieve under repressive regimes at home. But anti-regime diaspora activism after the onset of the 2011 Arab uprisings demonstrates that combating authoritarianism from afar is a challenging and complex phenomenon. Regimes have increasingly demonstrated a determination and capacity to repress diaspora activism through relying on their own formal and informal transnational networks of supporters. Middle Eastern diasporic communities are also far from homogenous, as their experiences, conditions, identities, agendas, interests and organizational forms may vary widely. Polarization among Middle Eastern diasporas is rife. Diasporas’ capacity to mobilize successfully and play an influential role is also highly dependent on the political and social conditions in their host state.

This panel of scholars, activists, and practitioners seeks to explore the demography of these recent diasporas, their forms of community organization, and modes of political mobilization. Among other things, this panel asks what is “new” about these recently formed exiled communities, especially in light of the historical legacies of political organization by diaspora communities since the latter half of the twentieth century. The panel also seeks to explore the role of the state in two contexts. How do local political and socioeconomic conditions in the host states as well as the changing contours of authoritarianism in the countries of origin impact the forms of mobilization that these communities have pursued in recent years? Other themes to be explored include changing notions of political agency and citizenship rights, the role of transnational networks and civil society organizations, the impact of digital communication technologies, transformations in youth culture among exiled communities, and identifying new ideological and intellectual trends within diaspora communities.

Featuring

Noha Aboueldahab is a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. She is an award-winning specialist in transitional justice and the author of Transitional Justice and the Prosecution of Political Leaders in the Arab Region: A comparative study of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen (Hart, 2017). Her most recent Brookings piece discusses how Western policymakers can engage the new Arab diasporas. Her forthcoming book examines the role of the new Arab diasporas in transitional justice and accountability. Aboueldahab is Co-Chair of the Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law.

Nadwa Al-Dawsari is a researcher, conflict practitioner, and policy analyst with over 20 years of field experience in peacebuilding, nonprofit management, and conflict-sensitive development. Areas of expertise include business development, managing organizational start-up and growth, program assessment and evaluation, conflict analysis, tribes and informal governance, nonstate armed actors, and security sector reform.

Dana Moss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on collective resistance against repression, authoritarianism, revolutions; transnational activism, diasporas, immigrants; and the Middle Eastern region. Her current book project, The Arab Spring Abroad, investigates how and to what extent anti-regime diaspora activists in the US and Great Britain mobilized to support the 2011 uprisings in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Her next book project will examine how and why members of military institutions resist participating in state- sanctioned violence. To date, her work has been published in venues such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Mobilization: An International Journal, and Comparative Migration Studies. She comes to the University of Notre Dame from the University of Pittsburgh (2016-20), where she was awarded the 2020 David and Tina Bellet Excellence in Teaching Award.

Lea Muller-Funk is a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration, migration governance, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Muller-Funk earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016.

Abdullah Al-Arian (Moderator) is an associate professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. He received his doctorate in History from Georgetown University and his master’s degree in Sociology of Religion from the London School of Economics and his BA in Political Science from Duke University. He is editor of the “Critical Currents in Islam” page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. He is also a frequent contributor to the Al-Jazeera English network and website. His first book, entitled Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Professor Al-Arian teaches introductory courses on the history of the Middle East, as well as advanced topics courses covering the history of modern Egypt, Islamic social movements, and the history of US policy towards the Middle East.

Sami Hermez (Moderator) is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. His research focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon, and his broader concerns include the study of social movements, the state, memory, security, and human rights in the Arab World. Hermez has held posts as visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, visiting professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. His professional experience includes work with the United Nations Capital Development Fund and World Bank in New York and Sana’a, Yemen, as well as a stint with the UN Development Program in Beirut. At NU-Q he teaches classes in anthropology that include topics such as violence, gender and anthropology in the Middle East. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022
2021-10-18 18:30 - 20:00 (Asia/Qatar)
On October 18, 2021, CIRS hosted a webinar titled “Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022” by Salma Mousa, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a Georgetown University in Qatar alumna (Class of 2012). The talk was part of the CIRS lecture series under the “Building a Legacy: The Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022” research initiative. Mousa’s talk was based on previous research she conducted with her colleagues Ala’ Alrababa’h, Will Marble, and Alexander Siegel, titled “Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? Estimating the Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Attitudes and Behaviors,” which was published in the American Political Science Review in 2021.

Mousa’s lecture revolved around answering a central research question: “Can exposure to celebrities from stigmatized groups reduce prejudice?” In order to address this, Mousa and her research partners took the elite Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah as a case study in an attempt to quantify his effects on reducing Islamophobia. Salah was used as a case study, not only because he is one of the world’s most successful contemporary football players, but because he declares his Islamic faith in a public manner, both on and off the pitch.

In order to test their central hypothesis, Mousa and her colleagues approached the topic through a “contact theory” lens, which was first presented by Gordon Allport in relation to racial segregation in the United States. The theory states that contact across group lines can reduce prejudice under certain conditions, such as when this contact places people on equal footing, when it is endorsed by communal authorities and social norms, and, most importantly, when the contact involves people cooperating for a common goal. These kinds of contacts across group lines is well suited to building understanding and friendships, and, ultimately, to reducing prejudice.

Using data on hate crime reports throughout England and 15 million tweets from British football fans, Mousa and her colleagues found that after Salah joined Liverpool F.C., hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16% compared with a synthetic control. In addition, Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. An original survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Their findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis—indicating that positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behavioral changes in prejudice.

About the speaker

Salma Mousa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. An Egyptian scholar of migration, conflict, and social cohesion, Salma typically partners with governments and NGOs in the Middle East and beyond to explore these questions. Her research has been published in Science and the American Political Science Review, and profiled by The Economist and PBS NOVA. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2020, and her BSFS in International Politics from Georgetown University in Qatar.

CURA Workshop: Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia
2021-10-21 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On October 21, 2021, CIRS hosted a CURA workshop titled, “Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia” led by Professor Logan Cochrane, Associate Professor in the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Via interactive exercises and group discussions, Cochrane guided thirteen GUQ and NUQ students to reflect on questions of power and their own positionality as researchers. One of the aims of the workshop was to demonstrate how food distribution and production is a politicized process that involves multiple actors with varying levels of decision-making power.

During the interactive group discussions, students were encouraged to think like policymakers and engage with datasets from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations to identify which decisions such surveys would enable them to make. Cochrane explained how both food security scholars and practitioners agree that equitable, transparent, and rigorous research methods inform decisions. He underlined how qualitative methods can complement quantitative data and explained how to choose which method is more suitable according to the size and scope of a research project.

Drawing on examples from his research on food security amongst rural Ethiopian farmers, Cochrane demonstrated the strengths and limitations of survey research and proposed how new, community-centered methods are more suitable for studying the lived realities of local communities. He highlighted how local engagements and interactions enabled his research team to gain insight into how rainfall patterns, debt, and migration—factors often not discernable in macro-trends in quantitative research—impact local patterns and behaviors. While survey research studies macro-level trends, a community-centered approach zooms in on the lived realities of people, producing nuanced data and analysis. Specifically, a knowledge co-production approach through questions, conversations, and interactions at the community level helps discern hidden patterns and behaviors, providing valuable data to support development programs in rural areas. Cochrane demonstrated the importance of studying sub-national trends in order to understand and address local challenges.

“The session was extremely engaging – I felt involved throughout and it was unlike what I had expected. The material about knowledge co-production has really caught my attention. Its utilization in working together with local stakeholders to capture and produce novel and nuanced data seems to me as an interesting methodology which I am trying to learn more about.”
– Pragyan Acharya, class of 2024.

In conclusion, Cochrane argued that researchers are not apolitical and thus need to engage responsibly with local communities. He explained that the strength of community-centered methods is how it involves local actors as partners in co-producing knowledge. Ultimately, he argued, the key research question is determined by these interactions. Cochrane reminded students about bias and the need for research that is inclusive and comprehensive that, “When one does not ask certain questions, then that data becomes invisible.” This reinforces the significance of using the appropriate research method for a compelling research project.

Article by Khushboo Shah, senior at GUQ

It's Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change
2021-11-21 12:45 - 13:45 (Europe/Moscow)
On November 21, 2021, GU-Q students presented their research on international systems for managing global climate change at a hybrid CURA Lunch Talk titled, “It’s Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change.” Six first-year students represented the group work of their classmates and covered topics on: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), IPCC 6th assessment report, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Council of the Parties (COPs), Qatar’s position on climate change management, and COP26.

The IPCC was described by Hind Al-Mohannadi (class of 2025) as the “Guardian of Climate Science.” As such, the IPCC produces assessment reports every five to eight years. The IPCC is a coalition of scientists and governments. The core scientists of the IPCC review all of the published climate science literature and produce assessment reports to highlight the areas of consensus in the science. They focus on studies that have a level of consensus of 99 percent or greater, which means the hypothesized outcome of a study is virtually certain. Maya Al-Kawari (class of 2025) presented the findings of the last IPCC assessment report (Assessment Report 6, Working Group I). She highlighted a statement of the report according to which it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” She then showed a chart that illustrated the near linear relationship between the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and global warming for five hypothetical carbon-emission scenarios until the year 2050. The chart shows that the global temperature will undoubtedly increase, it is only the temperature range that remains to be seen based on how effective actions to reduce carbon emissions are taken now (see figure 1 below).

Source: IPCC AR 6 Working Group 1

Another international body relating to climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Samantha Facun (class of 2025) explained that this is a monitoring and reviewing group consisting of 197 parties, including all UN member states and the European Union (EU). The COP is an annual gathering of the parties in which they try to work towards joint agreements or protocols to address the impacts of climate change. For example, the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and fully ratified in 2005 aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five percent over five years. The Paris Agreement (2015) is another example of an outcome from a COP, in which signatories pledged to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius, with a preferred temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Some parties form alliances to better lobby for their particular interests, for example, the Alliance of Small Island States, the High Ambition Coalition, and the Arab States. Unfortunately, data shows that the agreements that come out of COP meetings are very limited in their effectiveness (see figure 2 below).

Source: International Energy Agency

Moving further in to the view of Qatar in particular, Pei Ying Tsai (class of 2025) presented an overall picture of Qatar’s position toward the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, to which Qatar is a signatory. Consistent with global trends, Qatar’s greenhouse emissions did not decrease after the Kyoto Protocol or Paris Agreement came into effect. Qatar, a small state, ranks number thirty-eight globally in amount of carbon dioxide emitted based on its territorial size. However, Qatar ranks number one globally in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per capita. On the positive side, relative to the rest of the GCC, Qatar’s climate debt (the debt owed by developed countries to developing countries for the damage caused by their disproportionately large contributions to climate change) has decreased significantly more than the other Gulf countries. In the recent COP26, Qatar pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by twenty-five percent by 2030 – a mere nine years from now. It is planning to do this through significant actions taken in the areas of infrastructure and transport, water and waste management, and awareness.

Concluding the presentation, Angelo Castiello (class of 2025), highlighted the limitations of COP26 and the international systems for managing climate change. Climate change faces a notorious “free rider” problem, with poor commitment from the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, which are also the richest countries. The COP delegates are countries, but also industries. Notably, the COP26 delegates associated with fossil fuel industries outnumbered the national delegations (see figure 3 below).

Source: Global Witness, BBC

The overall takeaway message from the event is that despite the international attention towards and efforts to assuage global warming and the impacts of climate change, international agreements and governmental proclamations are not going to be enough. We as individuals must make the collective decisions in our daily lives that have potential for lasting impact.

Article by: Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS Operations Manager

Energy Aesthetics: New Directions in Studying the Cultural Life of Oil
2021-11-29 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Speakers:

Anne Pasek, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University

Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor of English at Yale University

Caren Irr, Professor of English at Brandeis University

Moderators:

Victoria Googasian, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Firat Oruc, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Transcript

click here to read

FIRAT ORCU [00:00:02]: Today’s webinar is part of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative, which has been generously supported by Georgetown Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies. Our research initiative now in its second year focuses in particular on the importance of lived experiences to the to the study of Energy’s past, present and future. We hope to facilitate the emergence of a new focus on energy as lived, everyday lived experience in order to add complexity and texture to the narratives within the field that have primarily focused on questions of state building, international relations, economic development and technological systems. Last year, we featured an inaugural webinar on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Energy with Dominic Boyer in Anthropology, Sarah Pritchard in History, and Jennifer Wenzel in Literature. In addition, we had three podcast discussions that focused and drew attention to different material or experiential facets of energy culture, with Elizabeth Barrios on Venezuelan oil literature, Anto Mohsin on electricity and everyday life in Doha and Diana Montano on the electrification of Mexico City. Our focus last year led us to closer attention to recurring themes and questions in studying lived experiences of energy such as representation, affect, structures of feeling and phenomenology of energy forms. As we were trying to formalize these concepts, we quickly realized that creative esthetic work with hydrocarbon in particular was a key venue to look at. To this end we produced a new podcast cluster themed as Energy Aesthetics: Representing Lived Experiences of Oil. We brought together creative artists to present their views on how their art deals with energetic life. We spoke with Venezuelan poet and scholar Santiago Acosta on abstract kinetic petro art and with Nigerian artist, photographer, and writer Victor Ehikhamenor about his installation, The Wealth of Nations and hopefully pretty soon with Iranian graphic artist Amin Roshan on his silkscreen printing work with crude oil. You can find all our previous activities on our web page, and we will share a link on the chat box. We conceived tonight’s webinar with the aim of bringing creative work and academic scholarship on energy together. We are really fortunate to have three distinguished panelists with recently published or forthcoming books to help us navigate new directions in studying the cultural and esthetic life of oil. I am honored to briefly introduce them being fully aware that these introductions are not really adequate to capture comprehensively the brilliant work they have produced. Our first speaker, Cajetan Iheka, is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. He’s the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature 2018, and a new one just came out from Duke University Press titled, African Ecomedia: Network Forms Planetary Politics. Our second panelist, Caren Irr, is Professor of English at Brandeis University. In addition to being author or editor of five previous books, she had recently edited a collection of critical essays titled Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity, published by University of Minnesota Press. And our third panelist, Anne Pasek is the Canada Research Chair in media, culture and the environment and an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. Her forthcoming monograph entitled Fixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World, is a comparative study of how carbon became legible to different communities to different effects. The running order for tonight will be as follows. Each of our panelists will give their introductory remarks about the panel theme for about seven minutes. This will be followed by a moderated discussion session, which will be facilitated by Vicky. During this discussion, we will pose a question to a specific panelist and then offer time for other panelists to respond to that answer to build on a point they have raised and so on. And finally, we will open the floor to audience discussion questions. Trish will moderate the audience Q&A session and wrap up the discussion. Two housekeeping items, one at the bottom of the screen at the very right. You will find an icon for close captioning, which will provide a live transcript and two, our attendees can post questions at any time using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. We will make sure to address them during the Q&A session. Finally, I would like to announce that we are in the process of drafting a call for papers and initial virtual working group on energy and affect theory with the goal of a special journal issue. Those who are interested in participating in or learning more about the project or have suggestions, please kindly get in touch with us. Now I will go ahead and give it to Cajetan for his opening remarks.
CAJETAN IHEKA [00:07:58]: Thank you so much for that amazing introduction, and to you and Trish and Vicky for their excellent invitation. It’s a pleasant surprise when it came, and it was exciting to see the work you’re doing. I wish this was in-person, but we’ll make do with this and hopefully, we’ll have opportunities to work in the future. So I’m just going to share screen, because I just want to share a few images, including Victoria Ehikhamenor’s work that was mentioned in the introduction. So basically, I’ll just talk through them. So I just want to talk through the notion of “oil afterlives” in the Niger Delta and more broadly, and one of the things that struck me as I worked on my new book, which just came out, “African Ecomedia,” is really the way that oil is scholars have talked about the saturation of oil in our lives. I’m thinking of Bob Johnson’s recent work on mineral rites. The way that oil expenditure really saturates our life. But it seems to me too as I was researching this book, that even as artists, writers, and scholars we’ve also been unable to escape oil. I realized that for a chapter where I was working on oil that was where I had the most material to work with and for other materials like, say, uranium, where there were, at least from the African context, there were fewer artistic productions to work with, or the same way that there’s a parallel between the saturation of oil in our lives and its saturation in cultural production. I thought that was something I wanted to start with. For us to think about oil’s materiality, not only as an object of producing material, but also the way that it has become the form and thematic content of too much cultural production, especially from the global south. So that’s the one place that I want to start. So then oil in culture productions, animating culture productions, like this mural, which is in Mayo County, in Ireland, we begin to see the way that it’s the oil movement. So we see in this particular image of a Niger Delta writer-activist, an environmental matter if we think about the fact that this month marked 16 years that the Nigerian government killed Saro-Wiwa for his activism against oil exploration in the Niger Delta. But, what then makes this community in Ireland to choose Ken Saro-Wiwa as the icon of this mural, which they were developing as a protest against Shell’s plan to position an oil pipeline in their community? So we find a situation here where we find this crisscrossing that oil makes possible: the Nigerian community meeting an Irish community — a Nigerian community that’s been devastated by oil and one that is about to enter the oil business. So oil here becomes this animating principle that joins Nigeria to this European scene of oil production. So, in a way then, oil becomes this…it takes on this transnationality in this particular example that we’re seeing now. In the same way too, in addition to bringing these communities together oil is taking on…it becomes the medium through which the human and non-human meet. Ken Saro-Wiwa protesting against the devastation of his indigenous community, but is also interested in the way that oil is affecting the landscape. And we see the vegetation here struggling to breathe, in this particular image, struggling to make an appearance in this image, we see that as a marking: that’s a boundary, that’s a border, the borderland, the contact zone. So oil featuring and functioning as a contact zone, not just where two communities meet, but also where humans and non-humans meet for interaction. Then of course, there’s also the question of oil infrastructure itself, the way that media has come to deal with oil infrastructure itself. And as we look at the future of oil, one of the things that have been interesting to me at the moment is what happens in places like Niger Delta, what happens to this oil infrastructure as we move to renewables, as we move to non-fossil fuel. The insightful work that has been done in environmental humanities from Rob Nixon and others, have shown us more clearly the durability of oil. I’m thinking of Caren’s new work on plastic, for example, the way that they outlive…the long-lasting durée of this material. So what then? What do we do with this archival infrastructure that remains potent, that remains toxic, that remains active, even post-renewable? As the world moves on from oil, will these communities in the Niger Delta and other parts of the fringes, if we can call them that…the margin…what happens to these communities as oil moves on…as we move on from oil. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. And what role will cultural production play in this afterlife of oil? But again, there’s a sense in which one of the things that we think about, ultimately, then is to hold on to this notion of afterlife and interrogate it when it comes to oil, when it comes to plastic. To what extent, what is this “after”? That’s one something I’ve been I’ve started thinking about: what does “after” mean? What does “after” mean within the context of the continuous radiation of oil, even when we’ve moved on from it? Even when we moved on from these communities. I’m thinking of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s community Ogoniland where, after his execution, Shell left the area, and it was said that oil production has stopped. But did production really stop after Shell left? With the continuous spill from the pipelines, the corrosion of the pipelines, and what that means for contaminating the earth, contaminating the water in this environment. So the notion of “after” is something that I’ve been thinking about, more recently. I was contacted by an artist working in Nigeria in the Niger Delta, who is using pipelines, the discarded pipelines in the Niger Delta, to produce art. So he reached out I would send my work to talk about the process of producing the work with me. And it struck me that this is the moment where he is working a stream in pictures of working with this material, which is black, blackened from oil, from those and I’m thinking about the kind of entanglements, that kind of transcorporeality that is happening in that moment of artistic production, where he is immersed in oil, so to speak, and what does that mean for him? But also for the communities that have been immersed in oil over time before these pipelines were discarded and he is using them for his artistic production. Then the other thing to think about, for me, beyond thinking of oil as this contact zone beyond thinking of its afterlives, when we have moved on. Is to think of the way that its the kind of binary structure, if you can call it that, that oil produces. And this is Victor Ehikhamenor’s work “The Wealth of Nations,” which he first exhibited in 2015 in Indonesia at this biennale. And it’s interesting to me that the way that this resonates…the way that the situation in Niger Delta, which is the context of Victor’s work, the way it resonated with this history of violence — energy violence — in that community as well, in the same way that the Nigerian context works with the Irish example that I started with at the beginning. But the other thing that is interesting here is the way that pleasure, the way that spectacle, the way that pleasure becomes kind of an animated impulse here and that it’s easy to lose sight of the violence of oil. As we take in this particular exhibit. So unless you know the history of oil violence in Nigeria… that these drums also serve as…they’ve also been used by the Nigerian state in the 1990s…they were used for the extrajudicial executions that were happening in the country, when many people were lined up, when people put protesters, so-called protesters were lined up, tied to drums like this, and executed for their protest against the Nigerian state. But again, think about it, what is the thing that the Nigerian state is most concerned about, which is the preservation of oil wealth. It is to make sure that oil wealth continues to flow uninterrupted, not because it would be used as a common wealth, but because it is such, that it will fuel the pockets of Nigerian leaders. So here we begin to see the way that oil projects are becoming complete. Oil aesthetics is an incomplete aesthetics. Inasmuch as it shows…it links spaces…Inasmuch as it brings into view areas of the world that wouldn’t normally come into existence. We also begin to see them as incomplete projects. They need a filling out. They need contextualization. They need aestheticization. So the cultural life of oil itself is incomplete I think. When we speak about representation so that what we’ll find here are ways that images, text, and other kinds of cultural production the way that with oil, there is always something that exceeds the grasp of the representation before us. So that’s oil always needs a supplement inasmuch as it is a fundamental aspect of our lives. So, yeah, that’s where I would stop. I’m hoping I would be able to flesh out things when we would get to the conversation proper.
ORUC [00:21:12]: Thank you. Thanks so much for those remarks, Cajetan. Caren, please take it away.
CAREN IRR [00:21:22]: I was going to start sharing. Yes, because I want to share something. So, OK. All right. Thank you. I’m going to share the slides that I’ve prepared too. And these are basically slides just to give you a little bit more concrete sense of some of the contributions to this collection that Firat mentioned that just came out Like in Plastic. And this is a collection that I started working on kind of like 2017, when the, in the U.S., at least we were having lots and lots of public discussion about banning plastic bags and straws. And though these very small items that you see around you as as waste, as things, you know, bags cut in trees and so on and became a kind of target of attention. I actually would be really interested to know why at that moment, these long standing issues with those two particular items have really kicked in. But whatever the reason, there was a dramatic rise in interest in the questions relating to waste, plastic waste and consumption or overconsumption. And I really wanted to see if there were ways to anchor those concerns with consumption in a broader economy of extraction and production of these of these synthetic polymers. So in other words, could we could we attach, the visible parts of everyday life that take the form of, you know, single use, cheap, often kind of colorful and supposedly super hygienic plastics to the dirty economy, much more widespread, underground and at a distance from the everyday lives of most American consumers. So that was the kind of question that I started with. And then I I did, of course, a group of the smartest people that I could think of. I am on this on this topic and got great, great and interesting essays that had to do with the ways that plastic is reckoned with in contemporary sculpture, in comics, in eco poetry, in the realist novel, in science fiction in a little bit. I have a piece on film and a chapter on on vinyl and the LP and how music culture kind of is dependent on a plastic substructure. And one of the things that emerged from this group of essays that kind of surprised me. I guess I should show you the cover of the Table of Contents for my book. Here I am. One of the things that really surprised me was how many of the essays that people were writing really hinged on the question of the human body, from the organs of perception, to the interior, to the life cycle, from birth to death and and a kind of unearthly afterlives, to use Cajetan’s word. And so many, so many of these things that people were writing about kind of touched on this question of whether we have the same human body in an environment that’s saturated by plastics. Definitely the people attending to these questions that I thought would be everybody’s question, which is, how is plastic the face of the petro economy? But I was really interested in this other in this other theme in the sensorium and the massive anxieties about the transformations to the human body that occur when the petro economy kind of takes this form in our everyday lives. And I guess just as a parenthesis, I want to say that I’m well aware that only about nine percent of the oil and natural gas, extractions produce plastics are used to produce plastics. But there’s a lot of interest. There’s been a lot of interest in forecasting whether those numbers will change. In the US mots of our plastic comes from natural gas. But I think that varies in different parts of the world. But everywhere around the world, the predictions are that there’s going to be a massive in continuing escalation of the amount of plastic produced to the end. If projections about shifting towards renewable energy sources for things like heating and transportation continue, that means that the portion of fossil fuels that are used to produce plastics is is highly likely to expand some. I read an article earlier that was in Forbes magazine predicting that as much as 45 percent of fossil fuel production will be used to produce plastics by 2040. So these projections you never really know, but I think the general trend of an increasing portion of the petro economy on taking the shape of plastics is is a good take away there. So let me just give you a little flavor of what the what the contributors did for this, for this collection. And I’ve chosen one from each from each piece. So Jane Kuenz from University of Southern Maine wrote a terrific piece about the Body Worlds exhibit. You know, more than 50 million people have seen this exhibit. It’s traveled around the world, and it’s comprised of these actual human bodies that were. They’re donated or scavenged for these exhibits and then preserved using this special process that the kind of main force between the exhibit Gunther von Hagens refers to as plastination, essentially injecting existing organs and musculature and so on with polymers that fix the body in these in these various poses. You know, in principle, according to the organizers of these exhibits, they’re supposed to be educational and kind of teach you about the glory and the beauty of the interior of the human body and promote healthy practices. Because, like they’ll show you lungs darkened by smoke and compare those to, the healthy lungs. So but, you’re not looking at a healthy human body, you’re looking at a plastic version of a human body. And there is something very unearthly about this way of preserving and ripping off the skin to create the spectacle of a body that is has outlasted, its subject in various ways. And Jane’s essay beautifully unpacks the centrality of plastic to this to this medicalized understanding of bodies, as well as a culture of spectacle on which in which it relies. And it’s, I think, just fascinating. I’m in the second section that’s more to do with with petro capitalisms. Chris Breu has a really interesting essay about Richard Powers’s novel Gain and the relationship between cancer clusters and illness, and that kind of corporate production of oil derived pesticides and cleaning products and so on. And he develops, Breu develops this interesting concept of the petrochemical unconscious. Kind of riffing off of other versions of the unconscious, especially Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. And what he’s interested in is, again, that that relationship between what we can see and immediately experience in this case, the experience of illness and the underlying economy and organization of our material life that’s allows that experience to emerge. So petro petrochemicals and their corporate use and circulation and sort of seepage into our everyday environments is the dynamic that brew and articulates. And he has an interesting way of of, if I may say, refining the concept of. Refining the concept of the unconscious to to suggest that it’s a version of like the non-conscious. It’s not that we can’t be aware of these elements of our life, it’s that we actively repress them in order to sustain something like unendurable private life. And I think that’s a really interesting dynamic I’d love to talk more about. And so from after death to illness, we move in in Margaret Ronda’s interesting essay on Eco-poetics into Birth. She has a beautiful reading of Craig Santos Peres’s The Age of Plastic, a poem in which the poet is meditating on his daughter’s birth and the presence of, plastic medical care equipment right there. From the very first seconds of her life, she’s wrapped in plastic and touched in someone. These are her first sensory experiences, outside of the womb. And I think that’s a that’s a really chilling kind of idea. And he’s both excited by and disturbed by the role of plastics in the birth in the birth process and kind of confronts the the the tenderness of the newborn’s skin with this kind of solidity and artificiality of the medical equipment. And then Adam Dickinson’s, Anatomic which she also writes about is involved involves a kind of poetic reflection on these endocrinological experiments or reckonings that records that that the poet does where he’s looking and basically at the and recording the traces of different kinds of plastic byproducts in his own, in his own body, bodily fluids. You know, the whole range of them. So there’s a kind of gothic element that has to do with this interior circulation of these plastic plastic elements. So here we really see that deep anxiety about the petrochemical presence. In human life, from its earliest moments in through adulthood and finally, the the last section of the of the book is about, is there such thing as a post plastic future? You know, if let’s say that every single ban on plastic was 100 percent effective and people complied with it entirely, we stopped producing plastics. We’re still living with, all of the tons and tons of plastic that’s already been produced and that’s clogs up the oceans and, circulates in our in our water, in our skin and our food systems and so on. You know what, what are these futures look like where you have these remainders? And Lisa Swanstrom has a lovely essay where she’s interested in thinking about the role that plastic has played just in shaping visions of the future at all, and then kind of turns that into questions about these, these newer or more recent petrochemical anxieties. So she starts with what she calls proto plastic imaginaries in H.G. Wells and a bunch of other writers who envision the their own kind of mock plastics. You know that and reckon with the strange capacities that this malleable, colorful, light, eerily lightweight and so on product has. And then I think through different kinds of worlds where that these essentially alchemical and magical substances can be produced through a number of different energy systems. So they’re kind of excited by in this early 20th century kind of utopian sensibility the the thrills of the benefits of plastic as the base of the petro-economy. And then she shifts to some contemporary stories where the and the blobby, amorphous shapes and malleable structures of of plastics take on a much more menacing turn. And she’s especially interested in faces in the way that there’s kind of masking of the human face that that emerges as an interesting theme. There are so the post plastic future is still one that we’re looking through. And in her essay, and some of the others as well that deal with the future kind of ask us to think about whether it’s even feasible to imagine a post plastic future because of the enormous number of years, centuries, millennia that it takes time to degrade the plastic that’s already been created. There may in fact, only be a continuity, of of plastics. Again, even if we banned them immediately switched 100 percent to other kinds of energy systems or completely shifted over to bioplastics made from corn or whatever else. So I guess the big takeaway from the collection as a whole, which moves and all kinds of other directions in addition to those that I’ve outlined, is that I think it might be a good idea for environmental humanities to maybe let go of a figure that certainly has been really important in American literary history, which is that figure of Leo Marx’s, Machine in the Garden, where it’s the disruption of the the train into the forest. That is that is the kind of signal for the for the problem, that we’re facing. You know, the train, of course, is coal in its big iron and it’s industrialism. And all those are, of course, ongoing crucial issues, as is the forest and deforestation. But so many of the problems that we are facing, but not yet fully able to picture to ourselves, I think relates to this plastic wrapped body, which I guess I would suggest is as good as a figure, as useful a figure, as compelling a figure as the machine in the garden and maybe even more specifically like plastic wrapped meat. You know that earthly experience of peeling back the plastic so that you can extract your food from it and do whatever it is, you’re going to do, chop it and cook it and put it inside your own body. That, I think is a kind of nutshell figure for the face of environmental problems that we’re facing that we experience today. It’s it’s eerie, it’s common. It’s anxiety producing. It shifts us away from something like the sublimity of the machine in the garden towards what Sianne Ngai calls, the stuplimity and the esthetic of repetition, almost tedium and eerie avant-gardeness, at the same time. And I think so. I guess that’s the takeaway that I have is that the plastic wrapped meat as a figure for our environmental condition can anchor us in the petro-economy and release a bunch of new esthetic projects that allow us to mediate on our environment. You know, in a way that wakes up our senses and wakes up our our ethical and political imaginaries. Thanks
ORUC [00:38:35]: Thank you, Caren. This is really fascinating, and I think what I hear in the first two present, the opening remarks it is a common term is corporeal entanglements, but will have further discussions about that. Now finally, Anne who will close out the first round of the panel, please.
ANNE PASEK [00:39:00]: Right. Hi, everyone. I’m going to try and be quick, so we have lots of time for your discussion. Yeah, I will get my slides in order. Yeah. So I, come to this question through a slightly different trajectory and that I am a cultural studies, media studies kind of scholar who’s really interested in climate politics. So before I came to care about oil, my my like commitment was always to like it was per million CO2. And my book project is all about the tricky problems of making carbon legible and like culturally meaningful to different audiences. When, like the materiality of carbon is a, is a fraught endeavor because it’s constantly moving through different forms of material, one of which is petrol carbons. Other forms include like CO2. Our bodies themselves, rocks, right? And so it’s it’s a sort of tricky thing to to track and act on politically and therefore a really intriguing problem to me. And so I found myself in Edmonton, Alberta, which was also my hometown doing a postdoc with the Petro Cultures Group, and I was sort of shocked to see this dissonance between my scholarly work, which was just very much all about, the media of accounting or of climate denialism and the everyday experiences of being around in the city, which which had absolutely nothing to say about carbon and where I had tons and tons of say about oil. So I found myself, coming back to this, the substance and the world that it makes. But but with less of an aim to write a book about it or an academic article, and more so to just sort of find a way to express and share some feelings, right. More more so then some thoughts. So for those who don’t know, Edmonton, Alberta is sort of the administrative capital of the province of Alberta, but also the large oil or tar sands development that happens in the north of the province. And the sort of state revenues from oil dictate the state revenues of the province. And I have a very, very pronounced thumbprint on the politics therein. But I also thought that it was just really pronounced presence in the city that I was being reintroduced to and wanted to reflect on. Right. So that I think just to give a shout out to the podcast. Santiago Acosta makes this point that oil has multiple ontologies, right. That it’s both a substance and a abstract financial substance, right. A commodity that gets traded, and that this sort of fraught dual nature of it can surface in different art forms can surface in different state practices. And I guess my observation was like, it’s very much true of affected infrastructure. So my my aims are modest. I wanted to produce something that would be a reflection about Edmonton’s petro-cultures that would circulate in Edmonton and that people who had the same experiences that I was having would know that we shared this condition that we could sort of go deep into everyday life and sort of connect over the weirdness of certain parts of the town, parts that I think are true of many, many cities in the global north. Maybe the global south to a degree, but but which just popped out in this very oily city. So I, during the pandemic started making some drawings, writing some text. Compiled it altogether into magazine called everyday oil. And a part of the reason why I was drawing was just to sort of linger really long in place. Think about what it means that like the the heart of the downtown, the Lake Club District has like a five to six lane highway down the middle of it, and that people are unfazed by by this huge sort of sensory disruption in the middle of urban life that there are strange, mysterious pipelines crossing through ravines that we don’t totally know what the substance are. But but were really captivating to me as a child, right. There’s a really lively culture of resistance and an occupation in relation to ongoing forms of violence, extraction and statecraft that are trying to build pipelines out of Edmonton into the states where that oil can be brought to market. And so I would find myself with my climate activist friends occupying malls and banks and and just sort of. In the strange experience of making everyday office workers uncomfortable, but not like unmanageable also and just sort of the overlapping worldviews and affects and emotional management strategies in that moment were were I think an intriguing one to capture. It’s also the case that most of the city’s parks are buried on top of gas pipelines just because this is sort of uninsurable land that can be sort of given over to public benefit as a kind of no cost afterthought. And so being environmental also means living on top of oil infrastructure. Many many people who’ve made out extremely well in the oil industry and who have rather expensive and oil themed country clubs in which a teenager can linger. And, the attempts to sort of find exit trajectories from oil finance to divest my own like very, very modest postdoctoral savings in my credit union, were were not only frustrated but but happens like a block away from the Legislature. And so the overall experience was just of everyday life and infrastructure being as was mentioned earlier, kind of interestingly, durable obstacle to imagining other worlds. And I wanted to just capture that and share that. And because I’m a cultural city scholar, I’m really interested in questions of circulation. So I I kind of have like a suspicion of formal art world institutions. I think, as Victor Ehikhamenor mentioned in the podcast, right, like he can show his art abroad, but to show it in Nigeria would be to not come too much because there is a kind of way in which folks are closed off to an arts based critique. I think that’s true to a large degree in Edmonton as well. So my my aim here esthetically was to use images to come up with a sort of affective experience, but also use that aesthetics as a lure. So I produced like hundreds of copies of this scene and dropped it off in like free libraries all around town, where people will read books or read pieces of art for folks to come and find. And then I also did what I’ve been calling a reverse snowball sample. So I have a little brother who works in the gas industry, and I gave him a bunch of copies to divide to his friends and then told them to give out further copies that way. So I’m interested in trying to think about modes of thinking and sharing and circulating ideas. These reflections, right, to sort of build up a common recognition that we all have these weird moments of encounter with oil infrastructures, but that, academic texts and art institutions may not always be the best way to do it. So it’s been an experiment and an interesting one at that. It’s been published in the journal Heliotrope, so it has the sort of afterlife circulating as an academic research creation product. But the the more immediate goal was just to get this out into the world and see what happens. And then I’ll just quickly add that this is a shifting energy gears, right. But the sort of spirit of practice space inquiry has lived on in my participation in a project called Solar Protocol. So with a couple of collaborators joined a network of of a very, very micro solar internet servers, which are sort of networked across the world and that we’ve published is in on what it might mean make solar-powered media, why you might want to do so. And what could come of it? And it is involved, building some technical skills, but also having a practice where every day I check to make sure my battery is appropriately charged and that I have a kind of interesting, effective attachment to my little solar system. Based on this practice of care, which folks on the critical make community have talked a lot about. And I’m sort of interested in also thinking about this sort of making practice sharing that rather than just just the esthetics, could be an interesting pathway forward. So there is much to say about lower powered internet stuff and the esthetics that obtains to like low power intermittent energy systems as as an interesting way of thinking forward to a future that might look a little more retro than chrome. And also this larger aspirations in the project to build up a global network of solar powered servers because there’s always sun somewhere. So if we can build our technology, based around those logics of intermittency, but also constancy, we might end up somewhere really interesting. But I will I will not dig too deep into that and I will instead. Excited to hear your questions and thoughts.
ORUC [00:48:55]: Thank you so much to all of our speakers for those really stimulating opening remarks. Now we are going to move into the moderated discussion and I am handing over things to my colleague Vicky.
VICTORIA GOOGASIAN [00:49:11]: Yeah, thanks Firat, and thanks to all of you for the comments so far. As Firat mentioned way back at the beginning, I’m going to direct the questions to each of you in turn to sort of take a first stab at. But I’m hoping that you’ll take the opportunity to respond to each other as well, because as has already become clear, these are themes that that really unite all of your work. So I’ll go ahead and start with with Cajetan, because your work as the title of your recent book suggests gives us this really useful theorization of eco-media. And you say or you argue that that eco-media forms approach the lived experience of energy by, “encouraging the cultivation of an ecological ethics that entails alertness to others into the world.” And the various instances of eco media that you discuss in your work, some of which you also sort of highlighted for us already this evening. These are these are instances that illustrate the representational capacity of the visual and media forms for laying bare the commodifying logic of oil extraction and its perversities, specifically in the Niger Delta. But we wanted to ask you if you can speak a little bit about the limits of that representational capacity. Are there moments where representation fails? And this, I mean, this is also, I think, following up a little bit on that on the tail end of Anne’s comments as well about the obstacles that this durable infrastructure of oil presents, even for cultural forms as well.
IHEKA [00:50:50]: Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for that, Vicky. As Anne was concluding, she talked about distributing this in a beautiful zine to broader colleagues, I was just thinking why it’s so interesting to go back and bring these guys together and have a conversation about what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking see how that’s…to what extend that interacts with Anne’s intention. But that’s by the way. One of the things that I think about in terms of representational limits, last night as I was listening to the podcast with Victor, he was talking about the image with Oloibiri: the tub with the water in his installation. He was talking beautifully about the way that there’s Oloibiri in water and then the oil, the oil spilling into that. And how it took 48 hours for oil to obliterate the water, but also the image — the cancelation –if you want to use that…the disappearance of Oloibiri, which is this community in Nigeria, where oil was first discovered in 1950s. So that for me, I think it becomes a paradigmatic case of the limits of representation, because what do we see when we find, when we encounter the image of when oil has saturated the water and obliterated Oloibiri? Do we have a complete image if we see it earlier on, when Oloibiri and oil is still intact in that water? So for me, representation, it’s really in this moment when the temporality of artistic production becomes unable to hold at once the multiple significations that is made possible with the oil…sorry, the water and Oloibiri intact. And then what happens 48 hours later when oil has overtaken everything. Especially now when this image circulates on the internet. When I see the image with Oloibiri intact, I don’t know what else has happened. I don’t know the kind of obliteration that has happened that would happen if I let oil drip into that water gradually. So I think we find that there’s a problem of temporality there that is compounded by circulation; the fact that we’re not all live witnesses in Indonesia when this was happening, or in Poland, where the work was recreated. So the problem of circulation that is banned with temporality, I think, is one of the problems of oil. The other thing about representation,…the other thing about representational image, and I talk a little bit about this in my new book, is the way in which sometimes the problem of…part of the problem of oil is the way that the kind of images it invites the image of spectacle that it invites I think oftentimes reduces or undermines the problems that we want to highlight in the first place. There’s a sense some of the images I work with, they’re images that have been aestheticized. They have become aestheticized in interesting, fascinating ways. And they run the risk of losing a critical edge, the critical edge that you hope that viewers will bring to such a work. So the problem of aestheticization, the problem of temporality, but also the ways that the problem of contextualization, I thought, the ways that these works themselves, they’re not in themselves self-sufficient. If we think of them as artistic projects fine, we can all bring our interpretations to them, and that’s fine. But when we think of them within the science of the kind of activist-political work we’ve been talking about this morning, the kind of meaning it creates becomes very important. There are moments when those meanings are not reached in some fashion, especially when we’re dealing with works from different parts of the world. There’s the risk of us absorbing those works also, instead of dealing with their singularity, embracing them within our culture. There is a sense in which they become diluted, they become immersed, just as oil itself and lose that texture. So, yeah, I will stop there. I’m curious to hear what Caren and Anne have to add to that. Yeah, I think I’ll give you both the opportunity to respond to any of those those I think you’ve given us now three limits of representation that ego media faces temporality, aestheticization, and contextualization.
IRR [00:56:50]: I think that’s such an important question, and certainly there’s an already existing discussion about the limits of of “mimesis.” You know, in environmental writing generally, like does reading a description of a beautiful landscape make you appreciate that landscape in some kind of a deep way that would supplement or even replace kind of immersion in that in that landscape. So that kind of problem about mimesis is replicated in these issues about oil economies and sort of toxic environments kind of more generally does a description, of a situation of toxicity or of horrific mining practice or fracking or something like that. You know, function on its own to interpret itself as Cajetan was just saying, like, is it self-evident. Etc. So I had to work with that. And then we have these kind of familiar problems about protest literature generally and what happens to that with the kind of ideological redundancies that are built in, to certain kinds of protest literature where it’s feels too closed not just to function as art, but to function in a very politically enlivening and energizing way that’s presumably central to the project in the first place. So I think those are crucial questions raised with particular urgency on this topic, and I guess I’ve been interested in so many other people have in these different kinds of ironic, skeptical, horror driven, kind of cheeseball humor, dark humor, kind of driven projects to see if they could produce some, some detours or some ways, some unpredictable and oblique points of entry into this whole situation. And I think in the plastics stuff that I’ve been looking at, they’re interested in, horror a lot. And I think as an alternative to elegy, as the as the kind of presumably politically charged esthetic. The difficulty, though, is I think more generally and there’s interesting things can happen there. But I think the general difficulty for for petro-esthetics is that we can picture if you, the infrastructure, the refinery, the pipeline, the gas station or whatever. But the substance itself is difficult, to envision, you know, maybe sometimes you have like the sheen on a on a black surface, doesn’t that cover image for Richard Powers gains that I showed you a few minutes ago. But like capital, oil is difficult to see. You see its effects and you see the commodities produced from it, the kind of intentionally produced commercialized versions. You see the mediations, but not the substance in circulation itself. And the flip side, so that’s for the text. The problem with representing toxicities relating to, petro-economies has that kind of familiar problem of kind of critiques of capitalism, literature, critics of capitalism or art, some critique of capitalism, but also on the utopian end. If the utopia for. But many people working on on energy issues is keep it in the ground, right. Then you’re your most utopian image is either the sun which is burned your eyeballs on or, like the undisturbed ground. Right. So again, you’re not seeing it, by definition, it reminds me and then I’ll stop, at that. You know, the effect that Antonioni gives in and Blow Up right. Where at the end of the film, there’s this famous scene where he’s like showing it’s an imaginary tennis match and the camera’s just kind of moving back and forth. But there’s no ball. You’re actually just looking at the court. But the preceding narrative has trained you to be interested in the drama of just looking at that empty court. Right. I think we need a similarly inventive kind of esthetics that will allow us to see an undisturbed landscape as one where there is a drama, and an interest. a projects underway and the project is keep it in the ground. And I don’t know what you call that kind of esthetic and a lot of people don’t like blow up. So it wouldn’t be exactly that. But or, it’s that’s a moment of the kind of post-modernist movement. But I think that’s that’s sort of a a bookmark for esthetic challenges that that we face for envisioning the utopian alternatives to a kind of horrific toxicity which were maybe more at ease with and partly. Yeah.
PASEK [01:02:32]: I won’t add too much on this because I think so much wonderful things have been said and I don’t want to prevent further questions from being asked. I guess I’ll just sort of pose an open question, which is that in the environmental humanities, right, we often look to artists to to do this esthetic work for us. I’m not sure that is a convincing historical argument, right. It seems like the way these questions get determined is what social movements make of esthetics and the sort of political energy they invest in them and the way that they make them circulate. And I think that we we can sort of see, in my backyard if that were right, like questions over the oil sands versus the tar sand and the sort of fraught questions of like the esthetic spectacle versus the slow violence that have come in that context, it doesn’t seem like there really is a esthetic that can do it all. And so it does seem like it’s a kind of war of position question where you’re trying to find contextually responsive, collectively inspiring answers to partial questions that help you move forward one step of the way.
GOOGASIAN [01:03:47]: I think maybe I’ll I’ll seize that opportunity that you’ve given me to actually direct a question that you, Anne, about your your recent work on the effective dimensions of energy and in particular, how these dimensions are being activated and how these contested narratives of of carbon. And and also maybe to kind of bring us back to this word, this key word that Firat already highlighted for us, which is transcorporeality is I think you argue that we have to attend to the transcorporeality of carbon in order to just sort of build these new structures of feeling toward the carbon cycle. And in your recent essay in Environmental Humanities, which I think Trish already linked in the chat. If anyone’s interested, you argue, I think pretty convincingly that climate denialists have already recognized and made use of this embodied transcorporealogic albeit in this kind of dishearteningly familiar appeal to racial and gendered stories about whose bodily experience gets to count. So we might, I think your comments are already pointing us in this direction. We might want to kind of view the realities of climate changes as a kind of settled fact and turned to artists and artists and cultural practitioners to sort of convey that fact to people. But you’re pointing out to us that the carbon cycle is already at the center of these multiple contested narratives. So I’m just wondering if you want to say anything more about this, about contesting the story of carbon. What are the…what new openings do we see when we combine effective and narrative work with our structural critique?
PASEK [01:05:34]: Yeah, yeah. So to sort of give a little more context about that article. So the article, which is also going to be a book chapter, is about how this one particular strain of climate denialism, I call them “carbon-vitalists,” argue that because we exhale CO2 out of our bodies and our bodies are in part made of carbon, as are the bodies of plants and animals and the whole ecosystem. And plants like carbondioxide. Carbondioxide is good and that we should therefore burn as much oil as possible to enrich the atmosphere with carbondioxide to serve the cause of life in cosmic terms, right. And it’s an argument that borrows from a lot of like ecosystem connection interdependence of esthetics, as well as really embodied ways of knowing the world. In this case, knowing it quite incorrectly right. And the bodies that are sort of centered in these arguments are all almost exclusively white men and their families. And the argument brought to bear is that, you know, if you call industrial pollution, pollution carbondioxide, then you’re sort of saying that our bodies are polluting and that really violates some deeply held racial scripts, and we will therefore reject your proposition. And I think it’s worthwhile to go to these uncomfortable case studies, where we see a lot of the tools of feminist anti-racist, science studies, or epistemologies or esthetics more broadly being picked up and used by our enemies because it reminds us that our tools aren’t like a priori a political good right. There are ways of appealing to embodied knowledge that are quite harmful and racist and have succeeded in delaying climate action in really substantive federal scales. But so that’s that’s the bad news. The good news to me, though, is that you can kind of look at how these esthetics are being mobilized and like, cry theft, right. And that there’s something encouraging about the fact that these extremely politically reactionary white guys do want to have a caring relationship for ecosystem, right. And they do want to to recognize that bodies can produce knowledge and that we should, you know, legitimate that. And so the sort of opening that to me suggests is that the goal is to kind of look through the stream of climate denialism, give a hard no to all of the racist, sexist stuff at its core. but just sort of see lingering in the chaff there are parts that could be mobilized to some other political project, right. Like, I think the way forward here is to to sort of demobilize these movements and redirect those energies towards other projects that fulfill similar affective needs. So I’m interested in thinking about what a future of carbon removal might look like. If we are offering scripts and like actual jobs, like forms of action, political and economic that people can take that do position them in that caring role, whether that is, getting oil workers to work on carbon removal pipelines or getting rural folks to do soil sequestration for for carbondioxide, right. It seems like they’re they’re in in like the darkest of of grim political toxins. We can see these sort of ways through and they’re not guaranteed, right. I think that how one picks up that potential is going to look very different in many different contexts and probably won’t succeed in every case. But it may be useful to to include that in the portfolio of climate politics because we don’t want a world where we are just sort of deepening our commitment and engagement with our in groups. Well, allowing those who have been politically polarized to continue to be more intensely against us. So I think that’s kind of a one one possible outcome of combining esthetic, affective and structural analytics and that you can sort of see these new tactical directions for climate strategy.
GOOGASIAN [01:10:10]: Yeah, that’s it’s really fascinating, I was sort of blown away by the idea that the logic of transcorporeality and embodied aspect is something that sort of unites voices from across the political spectrum in this context. I guess I’ll give the opportunity to our other two panelists or respond before I redirect us again here.
IRR [01:10:40]: I don’t know if people in this conversation have been reading Michael Marder’s work on plants, plant being. But if I could see it being super useful in that kind of conversation, he has some lovely concepts about the deep generosity of plants being, I mean, sometimes he uses the phrase vegetal-communism to think about this. You know where he’s…these are my leaves, you know, here. You know, if you think about plant being as you know it, sure, it absorbs carbon, but it’s also, you know, releasing endlessly releasing exactly what we need to do to breathe. And there’s…he’s got a way of thinking about plants, not just as passive receptacles or, you know, things that are being starved or whatever, which seems to be the vision of kind of the climate denialists that are the carbon-vitalists is in some sense. But you know, you’d only have to take introductory biology to understand, the cycle of that’s involved there. And then to think deeply with plant being as an act of release is I think, would be an interesting way to build knowledge rather than just shut down, which is surely if we’re not skilled sketch artists or, you know, aren’t engaged directly in art practice, then certainly producing knowledge and producing pedagogy and is a skill set that the.. we cultivate in academia, among ourselves and with our students and just being able to kind of seize seize the pedagogy, the pedagogical prospect, of a conversation like that, whether it be at a holiday or, you know, at a town meeting or whatever, it’s important.
IHEKA [01:12:44]: Yeah. Very quickly. I just…I’m really fascinated by this, by the idea of really contesting, the logic of carbon and producing knowledge around it. What I wanted to have to do that…to the amazing comments that have already been made is to think about, when we think about transcorporeality what kind of bodies are we involving in this connection? I think this becomes especially important in know when we think about, the global climate movement and the kind of voices and bodies that get emphasized, I think that’s crucial. I’m thinking about, I think in the pandemic when, you know, when there was…I think it was at Davos, when the youth…there were just youth climate activists, you know, there was a photo of them. And then this Ugandan young activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of the photo that The Associated Press had eventually published. You know, that’s you know, that’s I think, you know, we’re finding in that particular moment, this example, you know, there’s you know, the connection being made is these young people at that moment. The kind of knowledge mixing that would produce in a new epistemology is being undercut, undermined, when certain voices or certain images are removed from the conversation. So I think this has to be part of this knowledge building. Making sure that the future, the future of global climate activism movements to make sure that voices… It’s not just African voices, that is indigenous voices, but those other voices have a place and not just us talking about their worldview, their ways of seeing the world. That can be part of this new narratives, of new stories, new politics, new knowledge of carbon that is being produced just wanted to add that real quick.
GOOGASIAN [01:14:51]: Yeah, thank you all for those comments. I think I’ll just go ahead and ask one more moderated question because I know we want to save some time for the questions we’ve got in the chat as well. But I thought maybe I could direct a final question to Caren to help us think about furturity a little bit. Since this term afterlives has has also been sort of circulating through your comments, and it was definitely something that I noticed that connected a number of the essays and life in plastic, which is plasticity, is almost kind of paradoxical construction of futurity. Plasticity is this kind of toxic form, on the one hand, that’s threatening the future of life on the planet. And on the other hand, it’s a metaphor for survival. The thing that allows your body to survive after death and these amazing and terrifying exhibits in the Body Worlds exhibition. And this is a theme that also emerges particularly strongly in Margaret Ronda’s work on an eco-products as well. And in the introduction, you write about the plastic utopianism of the 20th century thinkers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Roland Barthe. And then you point out that this is a feeling that that has kind of faded in the ecological crises of of our own century. So I thought I would just ask if you could speak about how plastic or petrochemicals more generally shape our ability to imagine future worlds?
IRR [01:16:31]: Sure, and well definitely waste is always a question about the future, whether it be a spill, an oil spill or, you know, the Great Pacific garbage patch and all that stuff because it’s about what’s persisting, you know, what’s ineradicable or what’s going to, force us to envision a really long term timescale of biodegradableness or non-biodegradableness. So there are futures of that sort that are extrapolations or continuations or durations in some sense. But there’s but that that utopian futurity that you mentioned it a minute ago is, I think, well, it’s not central to the way that we necessarily think about plastic right now. It’s still present. And I think the key to that utopian aspect of of plastics and the many other forms of kind of commodity production in particular that are associated with, the 20th century boom in the economy. I’m trying to think of, trying to remember Ernest Mendel’s phrase. But anyway, like the economy is released by the combustion engine, essentially pre-computer economies. And the utopianism there has to do with, Wow, look what we can make. We can make new textures, new colors, new experiences in the world, it’s this it’s a kind of a radically and arrogantly humanist utopianism, associated with those those things. And while it was like the sorcerer’s apprentice kind of went crazy and got out of hand. And it is nonetheless, I think, something that you can read as a positive balance as well. Because if you can invent and make and circulate, throughout the world in a period of 50 years, is this entirely new substance that changes the the geologic record that introduces, plastiglomerates where there were none before then you can do other things as well. Right. There is a kind of capacity, human capacity to invent, that’s that and that plastic is an effective and a sign of. And I think there are ways to kind of read that utopianism, which is kind of out of fashion, I guess I would say into that or out of that substance as well and can recall the the force of our of our own technical abilities and so on. And just like, there’s a utopian face, I think, to like the pandemic, although of course, it brought us lots of new plastic waste in the form of masks and gloves, etc. But part of the utopian thesis you realize like, Oh yeah, all of these systems can change. Some of them, like on a dime, you can change transport systems. You can change the principles of public that govern public life. You can change the ways that you encounter each other or that you organize your leisure or that you organize your work experience and so on. Those things are not written in stone. The the well known difficulties of getting, massive numbers of people to cooperate and something that a minority feels is crucial. You know, those difficulties can be overcome. And so there’s a we just did it, you know. And, people complain and blah blah blah. It’s not without strife, but there’s a utopian aspect to our capacity to, alter the world. There’s a utopian aspect to anthropogenic changes in that sense. So I think that’s that’s something also that plastic kind of contains as as an option is a kind of knowledge about about malleability, the continuing malleability of social practice on a global scale. So I guess I would want to think about that include that repertoire of ideas in any conversation about futurity.
GOOGASIAN [01:21:11]: Yeah, I think it’s something that unites your comments about utopianism, here are some of Anne’s comments earlier is this idea that maybe in some ways our utopian thinking about energy is a bit retro, and that might not be a totally bad thing in the long run.
IRR [01:21:30]: Well, you have combined an uneven pieces of development in energy systems, and you need to be able to layer them all on top of each other. So as you slowly disengage from, from coal, for instance, you shift in another registers. Sometimes you have a rapid development, you leap ahead, sometimes not enough. I don’t know if other people. Sorry, I’ll say this one thing. I don’t know if other people have followed this story about conversions of some of the old British coal mines that have been out of use since the 80s into geothermal energy production sites, I just think that’s what a cool example of a infrastructure conversion project of green infrastructure because infrastructure can just like sit around and be ruins, but can also be converted and transformed in a way that’s not just like the depressing cover up, like making a park out of a pipeline, passageway. But but you can actually use…flip the way that you think about what that piece of infrastructure is and the capacity that it contains in these interesting ways. So I think they’re like functional utopian conversions also.
IHEKA [01:22:49]: Yeah, so very quickly, I wanted to say that one of the things about futurity is the ability to lead potential for creativity and imagination. But it’s also useful to be in mind that the future is unknowable, really. I’m thinking about the examples in the 20th century and the utopianism about plastics and how that has turned out today. So I think we want to leave room for contingency aware that we would never really know, or would never fully know what the future would look like. But again, that is not an excuse not to try, but it’s important for us to keep that in view to imagine our ecological future.
GOOGASIAN [01:23:44]: All right, well, since we only have a few minutes left in our in our scheduled time here, I think let’s all go ahead and hand it over to my colleague Trish, who’ll share with us some of the questions from our webinar audience here.
TRISH KAHLE [01:24:01]: And thank you so much, and thanks to everyone for a really fascinating conversation. In some ways, you know, we sort of pre-staged Peter Martin’s question here in the comments about the future. And so since we’ve just discussed that a bit, I’m going to move on and we have two other sets of questions. And so one I think relates to sort of the metaphors that we’re using to thinking about the relationship between oil and plastics. And that’s about sort of not just sort of being wrapped around the body, but also seeping into the body, right, bringing back particular kinds of toxicity. And so here, there’s a question here about the violence of oil and you could whether we could discuss the direct localized health implications of oil extraction. And similarly, right sort of more broadly thinking about not just oil in the context of the Niger Delta, but also thinking about petrochemicals and other forms of seepage from from plastics and energy infrastructure that have entered our bodies in particular ways. And so since I know that Cajetan has to leave first because he very generously came before teaching, I’ll sort of asking to start us off and then hopefully we’ll have time to also address Bob’s question in the chat as well.
IHEKA [01:25:25]: Yeah, thank you so much for that. In the Niger Delta, which is the region where I’ve worked, I think they have different kind of projects imagined to think about the impact of oil. You know, there is a project Curse of the Black Gold by Michael Watt and Ed Kashi, it is a multimedia project. And part of it include images of people that have been burnt from fires, from fire evolving from oil spill in Niger Delta. So you, you have you have that. There are some that some oral projects to the Niger Delta, talking about the impact on of oil on women, on fertility, or example, on fertility, on cancer. But part of the challenge of such projects is also that this the oil company and their promoters they find a way of trying to sow doubt, trying to ask cause I’ve really proven that this is a direct cause that oil is the direct cause of this. There are problems in Niger environment that’s responsible for some of these problems. Yes. So yes, the short answer is yes. You know that different forms of projects in different genres trying to capture. But there is a problem of representation too, for the women, for the people suffering from cancer. You know, we it takes time to detect in places like Niger Delta and Nigeria more broadly and even when they do, until, towards a terminal stage. It’s not really visible on the body. So that’s a question of problem of representation we’re talking about earlier becomes an issue. But there weren’t fire the victims are fire born, and that’s really that’s the most dominant trope of representation of oil, oil issues in the Niger Delta.
KAHLE [01:27:33]: And I think this question was also directed at you, Caren, as well as thinking about petrochemicals and plastics.
IRR [01:27:41]: Sure. Well, I guess I was sort of rolling around in my mind and a few examples of narratives because I’m a literature person, that’s mostly what I have in my mind. Although there’s interesting film things too that are the to follow through on the toxicities, which it seems to me there’s all kinds of interesting toxicity narratives. I think the question partly had to do with DDT in particular, which is famously the subject of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring touched, a crucial touchstone text for any account of American environmental writing and much discussed and kind of thought through. The toxicities, more recent kind of toxicities narratives that I can think of. They don’t all trace back to the petrochemical extraction processes, but they’re interested sort of more in these mediating roles. And for some reason, really blanking on the title of Ruth Ozeki’s novel, the one that’s about potatoes. It’s it’s has a it’s.
GOOGASIAN [01:28:49]: All Over Creation.
IRR [01:28:51]: That’s one. Thank you. Yeah, that would be a good one to consider in this vein again about pesticides. I think about that book every time I peel a potato, especially a burbank potato. They’re all clones, it turns out. So that’s interesting in itself. You know, so there are these kinds of narratives and a few few others that are going to come back to me in a second. I mean, certainly you have your kind of Erin Brockovich type projects as well and so on. So I think there are toxicity narratives that are interested, especially in cancer and cancer clusters, which is, cellular level. Joyce Carol Oates has a book about Love Canal, and that would be interesting there. Building over a waste site, superfund site, building housing complex there. So I think that it’s. There is scholarship about illness and the role of the ill body, Heather Houser’s book on environmental illness is really good on the subject and I think ways in which we have like the the toxic infused human body, not the monstrous one. You know, like there were all of these concerns about kind of nuclear monstrosity monster babies, in the wake of Three Mile Island and so on. But of the, kind of tragically damaged body created by the exposure to toxicities. Todd Haynes’s Safe, the film Safe, would be, is also a good one of relating to the kind of psychological breakdown that comes with constantly envisioning, your own future in intoxification. So there’s there’s lots of great resources to work with. And if that’s the question, there’s interest. Fantastic. I think there’s a lot of take up. What I’m interested in is why the. Why we don’t have a kind of coming together of all of these different micro-level or local toxicities into a big picture account of, their genesis and that’s that seems like it’s been harder to produce. So even if you think about superfund sites like, these state funded federal funded projects to renovate areas that were completely poisoned and become unusable, often through corporate pollution and seepage of oil related and other chemicals that are belong in the Earth. The sites are all separate, they’re all treated as separate entities. And I think what we what we need is a mapping and an interconnectivity of those sites, a kind of narrative that allows them to be pulled together into a common story. So that any project that can do that, I agree, would be really valuable.
KAHLE [01:32:13] So, I am going to give Anne a second to come back in just a second, but I just wanted to note that Cajetan had to leave to go to teach but we’ll go ahead and sort of wrap ourselves up here, but I just want to explain why he suddenly disappeared from the webinar. Anne of course, I sort of had the floor over to you. And then maybe as a final way of wrap up, we’ll come back to Bob Johnson’s question here about sort of threading the needle in particular pieces of works of art or pieces of literature that you can do.
PASEK [01:32:48]: Yeah. So on the subject of toxics, I would venture that you’ll find some interesting and different stuff if you look at the literature and science and technology studies. So books like Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, by Sara Ann Wylie are really great. You could also look at Michelle Murphy’s work and Max Libiron. Well, it seems like there are people thinking across forms of petroleum extraction, processing and their chemical afterlives or “alterlives”, as Murphy says. That that are not only like, very, very doing good work at sort of drawing connections and thinking about what forms of politics and esthetics are helpful in that conjuncture. But also sort of like, helping us maybe get over the the purity shock rate of of how do we have our our reaction where we sort of get get through the fact that, this is a significant shift in in where we mark the boundaries of of clean and dirty or, contaminated and not. And if we are all to some degree and to very importantly, differential degrees, but but to some degree, all contaminated, where then do we begin towards building that better future. And on that note, right, the subject the prompt about like what some interesting pieces of work have been for thinking towards that. I’ll just make the pitch that it’s it’s good to play around with renewable energy technologies and see how they work. And there are tons of projects that are sort of maker projects or related art projects that are interested in sort of thinking about the rhythms and affects and feelings of solar and wind. I’ve talked a bit about the Solar Protocol website. I think it’s lovely. Branch Magazine is a publication that’s put out by, I think, the Mozilla Foundation in part. And they they do the fun thing of they will serve you different esthetics based on the carbon intensity of your local grid. And that’s a changes by the hour. So if you find yourself surfing the internet during peak energy demand time, you will get image descriptions. But if you come back. In my case, in Ontario, during lighter periods where there’s less gas peakers on the grid and it is more nuclear, solar and wind, then I will get full images. And it just seems like there there are ways of sort of joining together esthetics, everyday life and and these cultural idioms to sort of prompt awareness to how energy moves through our worlds, our our global ecosystems and our day to day energy systems, as well as like, what kinds of esthetics might be inappropriate opening for for sort of living more deeply with different kinds of energy forms. And that, again, I keep coming back to esthetics less as a sort of critical tool and more as a sort of activist lure, right. I think it’s a way of bringing people into a project, making them excited to think new thoughts. And it could be in that kind of generative spirit rather than one purely of just like, aesthetic critique that we might embark on a new journey. So I’ll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks all for the rich discussion.
KAHLE [01:36:17]: And I am so sorry that we have to sort of end it here. I do want to if there are any colleagues listening, I really do encourage using the, Making Energy Strange work in class. My students worked with Anne’s work and actually tried to replicate it in their own lives to make energy strange, and it was an incredibly fun and productive exercise. So I just thank you again to and Caren, Anne and Cajetan, as well as my colleagues, my colleagues, Vicky and Firat and our colleagues here at CIRS. And thank you again all for joining us.

Resources

Books

Cajetan Iheka, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. Duke University Press, 2021.
Cajetan Iheka (ed.), Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Modern Language Association, 2021.
Cajetan Iheka (ed.), African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space. Boydell & Brewer, 2019.
Caren Irr (ed.), Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. (forthcoming)
Bob Johnson, Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1982
Leo Marx, The machine in the garden : technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press, 1964
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, Columbia University Press, 2016
Sara Ann Wylie, Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, Duke University Press, 2018.

Articles

Anne Pasek. “Carbon Vitalism: Life and the Body in Climate Denial.” Environmental Humanities 13, no. 1 (2021): 1-20.

Monograpghs/ Novels/ Poetry

Fixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World – Anne Pasek (forthcoming)
Gain: A Novel – by Richard Powers
Anatomic – by Adam Dickinson
The Age of Plastic – by Craig Santos
The First Men in the Moon – by H.G. Wells
Everyday Oil: Energy Infrastructures and Places That Have Yet to Become Strange – by Anne Pasek
Silent Spring – by Rachel Carson
All Over Creation – by Ruth Ozeki
The Falls – by Joyce Carol Oates
Branch Magazine

Podcasts

The Cultural Lives of Oil – with Santiago Acosta
Oil, State, and Violence – with Victor Ehikhamenor

Projects/ Films

Solar Protocol
Blow Up (1966) – by Michelangelo Antonioni
Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta – by Michael Watts
Safe (1995) – by Todd Haynes

La última cena - The Last Supper
2022-01-18 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Film Synopsis:On a Cuban sugar plantation in the 1790s, a count casts himself as Jesus Christ to re-enact the Catholic holy week with twelve of the men he is enslaving, until, on Good Friday, the enslaved people on the plantation revolt. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece was part of the new Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, actively engaging the viewer in a process of democratic critique.

Content Warning: drama, violence & gore, cruelty, torture, frightening and intense scenes, sensitive subject, racial slur, PG 18+

The film was screened via a virtual event on January 18 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Robert Carson

Robert Carson is Assistant Professor of English in the Liberal Arts Program at Texas A&M University at Qatar. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Interest, and The Journal of the Gilded and Progressive Era. He is currently working on a book on political commitment in 20th-century British and post-colonial fiction.

Daughters of the Dust
2022-02-01 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Film Synopsis:Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-The women of the Peazant family struggle with a decision which will remake their relationship with their heritage and with each other. Julie Dash’s groundbreaking 1991 film tells the story of generational change in the Gullah community of the South Carolina sea islands with rich visual language and non-linear narrative.

Content Warning: drama, romance, violence, profanity, racial bias, PG 18+

The film was screened on February 1 via a virtual event and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Dana Olwan

Dana Olwan is an Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Women, Society, and Development program at Hamad bin Khalifa University. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gender violence, transnational solidarities, and critical feminist pedagogies. Her writings have appeared in Signs, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, and Feral Feminisms. Her first book Gender Violence and The Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. She is co-editor with Chandra Talpade Mohanty of the Reimagining Comparative Feminist Studies book series from Palgrave Macmillan. She teaches courses on feminist theory, gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and women, labor, and development.

Additional Resources

Beyoncé, Lemonade (2016)
Katherine McKittrick

Demonic Grounds (Minnesota, 2006)
Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke, 2021).
May be worth linking directly to her site since there are multimedia formats to engage these texts, including examples of her citational practices.

Saidiya Hartman

“Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/241115
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1997).

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2020)

Who Belongs to a Country? National Representation and Identity at the FIFA World Cup 2022
2022-02-02 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Panelists: Zahra Babar, Gijs van Campenhout, Ross Griffin, Edward J. Kolla, and Peter Sprio

Moderator: Danyel Reiche

The panel discussion explored critical issues such as the recruitment and naturalisation of top foreign athletes, a practice that is making national dreams come true, but also stirring public debate around sports and national identity. Centering on Qatar’s role in shaping the global conversation around sports and society, the webinar covered a range of topics, including the reasons athletes switch nationalities and the citizenship requirements set forth by international sporting federations such as FIFA. The panelists also explored conceptions of ethnicity and civic nationalism, and the future of citizenship and residency laws in a globalised world.

Tula: The Revolt
2022-02-15 17:30 - 20:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Film Synopsis:On Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies, Tula leads a revolt. The enslaved people who seized their freedom on the island in 1795 would be brutally repressed and slavery reimposed, but today the revolt is recognized as being the beginning of the end of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean. Leinders’ film features actor Danny Glover, who has advocated and worked to bring stories of slave revolution to the American cinema.

Content Warning: history, war, violence, racial bias, PG 18+

The film was screened on February 15 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle

Trish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently, she is working on her first book, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production, distribution, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia, the American Society for Environmental History, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, the University of Chicago, and several research libraries.

Adanggaman
2022-03-08 17:30 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Film Synopsis:In West Africa during the late 17th century, King Adanggaman leads a war against his neighboring tribes, ordering his soldiers to torch enemy villages, kill the elderly and capture the healthy tribesmen to sell to the European slave traders. When his village falls prey to one of Adanggaman’s attacks, Ossei manages to escape, but his family is murdered except for his captured mother. Chasing after the soldiers in an effort to free her, Ossei is befriended by a fierce warrior named Naka.

Content Warning: violence, brutality, racial slur, sensitive subject, PG 18+

Free Screening

LOCATION: Georgetown University Qatar

The film was screened on March 8 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor James Hodapp

James Hodapp is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University in Qatar in the Liberal Arts Program where his primary focus is African and postcolonial literature and visual cultures. His work on literature, cinema, comic arts, television, and podcasts from Africa have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, African Literature Today,  ARIEL, Research in African Literatures, and English in Africa, among others. He is also the editor of the collections Afropolitan Literature as World Literature and Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature from Bloomsbury academic publishing.

Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center Working Group I
2022-03-09 09:00 - 2022-03-10 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On March 9-10, 2022, CIRS convened the first Working Group under its newly launched research initiative on Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center. The meeting was held as a hybrid event, allowing for both virtual and in-person participation. The goal of the working group was to bring together scholars from different disciplines to examine the role of the upcoming FIFA World Cup in enabling the state of Qatar to move from the periphery of global sports and politics to the center. Applying both empirical and theoretical lenses, the invited scholars addressed a number of topics including Qatar’s national security, the impact of the pandemic on mega-sporting events, national identity, tourism, and sports sponsorships.

The meeting began with Gerd Nonneman’s discussion on the links between Qatar’s national security and the World Cup. He noted that the Cup was one component of a wider and longer-term security and developmental strategy since the 1990s of raising Qatar’s global visibility, acquiring economic resources, moving to sustainability, and building supportive global networks. Given its small size, limited hard power resources, and powerful neighbors, security has been a key driver of Qatari policies at home and abroad. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) development brought both resources and global economic networks. To the continuing aim of building equally global diplomatic networks was then added the ambition to build a sustainable economy beyond hydrocarbon dependence. Staging the World Cup aimed to serve these goals, by raising global awareness of the “Brand Qatar” and helping to lay the foundations for a more diversified economy. It also helped accelerate not only the building of the infrastructural underpinnings for future development, but equally necessary reforms of migration and labor policies – attempting to match the needs of a viable future economy and global branding with the exploration of an evolving national identity.

The second session of the working group focused on the World Cup 2022 and the pandemic. Kamilla Swart suggested that Covid-19 was almost entirely unique in how it upended the sporting world. While we are currently witnessing the return of competitive sports at various levels, the pandemic still remains a threat. In preparation for hosting the World Cup in winter 2022, Qatar has effectively hosted ‘test events’, such as the FIFA Arab Cup, and implemented restrictions and social distancing during the games. Swart stated that the compact nature of the World Cup will be a challenge, especially in regards to implementing Covid protocols and managing the influx of the expected visitors. She highlighted that some of the key areas that require research are the nature of Covid protocols, fan management, vaccination administration and statuses, non-communicable disease, injuries prevention, and the burden on health care and medical facilities during the games. Swart suggested that new risks and disaster management during the World Cup is a key area requiring new research.

Continuing the discussion on health-related issues, Andreas Flouris addressed the question of whether serving as hosts to the World Cup leads to the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Flouris pointed out that, based on existing health data on Qatar, 70% of deaths in the country occur due to chronic diseases, most of which are tied to obesity and low levels of physical activity. Qatar has adopted policies and undertaken new interventions such as tobacco-free policy, building of recreational spaces for physical activity, and the Tamreen education programs in schools that are all geared towards promoting healthy lifestyle. The Ministry of Health in Qatar is engaged in a 3-year collaboration with the World Health Organization for health promotion. Health and nutrition programs have also been developed in the country. However, the core question of whether the 2022 FIFA World Cup has enabled an overall healthier lifestyle in Qatar still needs to be addressed. Are there efforts underway to encourage the aging citizen population to adopt healthier habits? At a global level, there is little evidence on whether mega sporting events such as the World Cup actually have a positive health impact on host countries. Flouris suggested that there is a need to collect baseline and longitudinal data and compare Qatar with other countries that have hosted the World Cup. Additionally, Flouris discussed the lack of school physical education curriculum and the impact of a harsh environment and desert climate as being critical issues affecting patterns of physical activity.

Andreas Krieg examined how Qatar’s engagements in Afghanistan as well the hosting of the World Cup 2022 have both been means by which the state has exhibited its soft power. Post Arab Uprisings Qatar has been translating its financial power into regional and global influence, and the World Cup and Afghanistan have served as sites where Qatar has been able to display its power of appeal and attraction. Krieg stated that diplomacy, investment, energy and LNG demand, education and developmental policies, and sports are the main tools through which Qatar is trying to achieve its policy goals. Whereas military action is the least influential lever of its soft power. The World Cup has put Qatar and the MENA region on the global map and the Afghanistan moment has helped Qatar build networks and increase regional influence in Asia. Bridging the gap between the western world and Islamic countries and the exploration of Qatar’s potential as a mediator were identified by Krieg as key areas of further research.

Danyel Reiche focused his remarks on the topic of Qatar Airways and its sports sponsorships, with Germany’s leading football club Bayern Munich serving as a case study. Reiche stated that Qatar Airways, which has been operational for 25 years, has been leveraged by the state to achieve various state objectives including enhancing its visibility in the global realm. Qatar Airways has a history of sports sponsorships which was amplified post the financial crisis of 2008. The airline was the shirt sponsor for Barcelona from 2013-2017 and is currently Bayern Munich’s sleeve sponsor in an agreement that started in 2018 and goes until 2023. Reiche explained that while these sponsorships give the state of Qatar a lot of exposure, they also show the limitations of soft power approaches. These sponsorships have met with a lot of resistance on the ground in the European states where these teams are based. Reiche suggested there was a need to explore why there is such a persistent critique of this particular sponsor and not of others from non-democratic countries.

Ross Griffin examined Qatar’s national identity in relation to the Qatari-owned French football club Paris St. Germain (PSG). Griffin suggested that Qatar has used sports to shape its national identity while simultaneously positively projecting its identity to the rest of the world. The acquisition of PSG has been part of state efforts to promote a global image of Qatar as a progressive state. Much of the attention that Qatar has garnered from the global sporting world since being awarded the bid to host the 2022 World Cup Qatar has been negative. PSG has partially served to dissipate some of that negative attention. Griffin outlined that some key questions to explore would be to look at how the ownership of PSG defines Qatar’s national identity. How do PSG fans react to this ownerships and how progressive national identity is being achieved with the hiring of elite and famous football players?

Sebastian Sons led the discussion on the nexus of Qatar’s development assistance and sport. He detailed Qatar’s humanitarian aid portfolio in recent years and stated that Qatar’s development assistance has been closely related to domestics polices, economic diversification, geo-strategic interests and its ideological affiliations. In recent years, there was a fundamental shift in the nature of the aid provided. It shifted from Islamic forms of aid to development assistance, with the focus on financing youth and female developmental projects. Sons specified that the main point of query is to question how do sports come into this story of Qatar’s developmental aid. He narrated that Qatar has been financing sports developmental projects in partner countries and on a domestic level, but it remains unclear what are Qatar’s interests in becoming a hub of exchange and human development in the fields of sports and development. Examining what role sports play in regional integration and cooperation, in identity construction and migration through different development projects, were some key areas identified.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen explored Qatar’s New Development Model and argued that over the years Qatar has built a branding model that is based on diplomacy. Qatari policy making, which is influenced by the Qatar Vision 2030 has aimed to build a unique developmental model. Various construction, infrastructure development projects, and domestic policy changes have propelled the country towards a progressive state. During the blockade of 2017 regional associations and collaborations were affected which now have been revived. Ulrichsen argued that there is a need to examine what tangible legacy this model will have and what measures could be undertaken in regard to migrant labor issues that the country has been facing since winning the bid for hosting the World Cup.

Irene Theodoropoulou led the discussion on Sports Tourism in Qatar and FIFA 2022 for the next session. She argued that Qatar will be using tourism to rectify its global image and diversify its economy. Qatar Tourism has combined the traditional with modernity to develop a new tourism strategy that aims to put Qatar on the global map in terms of culture, sports, business, and family entertainment tourism. A new airport and visa free arrival policy has been developed to diversify tourism in the country. Theodoropoulou highlighted that further study needs to be conducted in the areas of intercultural communications in Qatar, demographics of tourists expected during the World Cup, improving relations and developing synergies between Qatar Tourism and Qatar Airways, and developing better media relations.

The discussion then shifted to beIN sports and its global influence. Craig LaMay addressed beIN’s dominance over football broadcasting in the MENA region as well as coverage of other sports in the U.S. and UK. He stated that since beIN was a private entity, publicly available records of its operations do not exist. beIN’s regional and global operations have been severely affected during the pandemic, and the company will need to innovate in order to be competitive and to retain its broadcasting rights. Its model of pay-TV is being challenged by streaming services and even free-to-air alternatives. beIN’s traditional bundled service not only faces competition from new models and a variety of cheaper services but also has to deal with issues such as piracy and non-live content provision for its customers across the globe.

Uday Chandra and Aisha Al-Kuwari initiated the conversation on Qatar 2022 and Popular Culture. Chandra argued that there is a need to understand the nature of fandom in Qatar and how the preparations for the World Cup have remade popular culture. Aisha explained that fan culture in Qatar is associated with a fireej or neighborhood, and fans had loyalties to the local clubs established by community elders in these neighborhoods. She added that fandom was also associated with the culture of majlises, in which people gather to watch games and root for teams. Women’s increasing participation in football fandom in Doha, including in stadiums in the recent Arab Cup, and the limitations of gender stereotypes in journalistic accounts also came through in Aisha’s remarks. With respect to non-citizens, Chandra spoke of their absence from discussions of fandom and popular culture in Qatar and highlighted recent scholarship that shows strong loyalties to host societies in the Gulf. Although migrant workers recurrently appear as mute victims in Western European commentary on the World Cup, labor activism by these workers remains understudied.

The next session looked at Aspire Zone and its rise to become a Global Benchmark for Talent Development and Sports Medicine. Paul Brannagan explained that small states tend to find niche industries that are culturally different and sets them apart from their neighbors. For Qatar, sports is the niche industry through which it is making a mark on the global stage. Aspire Zone and Sports Academy are part of Qatar’s sporting strategy and aids the State in building its sports portfolio. Brannagan identified that there is the need to examine how and where Aspire fits in Qatar’s sporting investments and global political agenda. He also highlighted that through Aspire, Qatar is producing a stream of athletes and is showing its ability of overcoming the disadvantage of its population size. The legacy of Aspire post-2022, the role of Aspire in sports humanitarianism, and global sports medicine were some other key research areas identified.

Johan Granberg discussed community building and the Education City Stadium. He stated that identity doesn’t make people stay and that people required environments that they could co-exist with. Building a stadium in a city is a good project for the city and helps build its image but there are very little examples of these buildings being good for the community. The stadium in Education City might be a good example of a good stadium but lacks the communal aspect and engagement required by society. He stressed that often stadiums become beautiful object that has very little use for the community after the games. Granberg expressed that the questions of how the Education City community can use the arena and what can be gained from it requires further exploration and research.

Th last session of the meeting looked at Sport Security and the Role of the International Center for Sports Security (ICSS). Magda De Lange expanded on ICSS’s role in addressing safety and security in global sporting events. She stated that while work has been done to address issues of safety and security in traditional sports, research on esports remain limited. An athlete-centered esports ecosystem is developing as a new trend. Of critical concern is that there are sparse, decentralized resources for collegiate esports players and limited regulation or fact-checking for practices. Gaps in the existing scholarship which could benefit from academic exploration and new research are: research on how to provide consistent guidelines to support young esports players; dual careers of esports athletes; the use and promotion of esports as an added value for P/CVE interventions to increase societal resilience and empowerment. Esports research’s key barriers and key considerations include understanding the ecosystem of esports, sampling by device, then by game genre, examining the positive impacts of esports, and emphasizing equity in players.

In conclusion, Dean Clyde Wilcox, Director of CIRS, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting, among others, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022.

In conclusion, Dean Clyde Wilcox, Director of CIRS, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting, among others, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022.

To view the working group agenda, click hereTo read the participants’ biographies, click hereRead more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Aisha Al Kuwari, Georgetown University in QatarHend Al-Muftah, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, QatarMariam Al-Thani, Georgetown University in QatarZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarKathy Babiak, University of MichiganMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarPaul Brannagan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UKUday Chandra, Georgetown University in QatarKristian Coates Ulrichsen, Rice UniversityMagda de Lange, International Center for Sport Security (ICSS), QatarAndreas Flouris, University of OttawaJohan Granberg, Virginia Commonwealth University–QatarRoss Griffin, Qatar University Andreas Krieg, King’s College LondonCraig LaMay, Northwestern University in QatarSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarGerd Nonneman, Georgetown University in QatarDanyel Reiche, Georgetown University in QatarSebastian Sons, Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO)Kamilla Swart, Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU)Irene Theodoropoulou, Qatar UniversityElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University QatarClyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

How Has the World Cup 2022 Changed Qatar?
2022-03-20 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Ever since Qatar was awarded the hosting rights for the FIFA World Cup 2022TM in December 2010, the small state has been criticized for its human rights record in Western media, particularly by British newspapers. In our panel, we will discuss the changes that have taken place in Qatar in the last decade and the challenges that remain. We will also focus on migrant workers and women’s rights and how staging the world’s most remarkable sporting event has impacted the diversification of Qatar’s natural gas dependent economy, and its relations with other countries in the region and worldwide.

Featuring: Danyel Reiche, Amal Al-Malki, Gerd Nonneman, Alexis Antoniades, Haya Al-Noaimi, Max Tuñón.

Harriet
2022-03-22 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Film Synopsis:The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.

Content Warning: violence & gore, cruelty, torture, profanity, alcohol consumption, frightening. Rated R, PG 18+

Free Screening

LOCATION: To be updated closer to the date.

The film was screened on March 22 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Brittany Bounds

Brittany Bounds teaches critical thinking and social skills through U.S. History and American Military History to undergrads at TAMU-Q. She is also the co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum, which supports female faculty, academic staff, and students at the university. She also advises the Engineering Entrepreneurship Society who encourage students to combine their engineering and business skills. Dr. Bounds further engages students through STEAM by putting the A into STEM through the annual Showcase of student projects that display creativity through video and poster. Dr. Bounds obtained her Ph.D. in U.S. History with an emphasis in social/cultural and military/diplomatic history at Texas A&M University in College Station. Her research centers on U.S. history and how its roots explain current debates in American society. Her dissertation explored the Silent Majority’s reaction to the social movements of the 60s: the response to civil rights, campus liberals, antiwar protesters, racial riots, and women’s liberation by examining written modes of communication from a media-silenced American majority. Her publications include topics on the Civil War, 1960s culture, and counterterrorism.

Mediterranea & Al-Sit
2022-03-30 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Mediterranea

Film Synopsis:The film depicts the Africans’ interaction with Italians, and their lives as migrant workers, which includes friendships and animosities, boredom, and temptation.

Content Warning: violence, gore, profanity, alcohol and drugs consumption, smoking, frightening & intense scenes, sex & nudity, PG 18+

Al-Sit

Film Synopsis:In a cotton-farming village in Sudan, 15-year-old Nafisa has a crush on Babiker, but her parents have arranged her marriage to Nadir, a young Sudanese businessman living abroad. Nafisa’s grandmother Al-Sit, the powerful village matriarch, has her own plans for Nafisa’s future. But can Nafisa choose for herself?

Content: Short film, in Arabic with English subtitles

The screening followed a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle.

Trish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently, she is working on her first book, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production, distribution, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia, the American Society for Environmental History, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, the University of Chicago, and several research libraries.

Global Perspectives on Slavery and Freedom on Film
2022-04-13 18:00 - 19:30 (Asia/Qatar)
The Webinar was a concluding panel discussion for our Cinematic Afterlives film series and aimed to discuss the stakes and challenges of portraying slavery and abolition through film from different perspectives and geographic contexts.

Speakers: Alyssa Sepinwall (California State University San Marcos), Dexter Gabriel (University of Connecticut), Parisa Vaziri (Cornell University) , and Firat Oruc (Georgetown University in Qatar)Moderator: Trish Kahle (Georgetown University in Qatar)

This event is part of Cinematic Afterlives: Film and Memory in the Black Atlantic research project.

Affects of Energy Transition Working Group I
2022-05-24 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On May 24, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University Qatar convened the first working group under its Energy and Affect Theory research project. The working group, led by GU-Q faculty members Trish Kahle, Firat Oruc, and Victoria Googasian, was held virtually and brought together multidisciplinary scholars to discuss their paper abstracts for written contributions that are being developed as a journal special issue. The participants engaged in focused discussions on cross-cutting themes of affect, energy transition, and labor that will inform all of the papers in the collection.

Animesh Chatterjee proposed a study of everyday experiences of energy in colonial Calcutta’s domestic spheres, around 1875 – 1940s. His paper contribution builds on a larger book project which describes the social life of electricity in colonial Calcutta. He proposes to examine how class and social identities shaped the ways in which people interacted with and made meanings of different forms of energy, especially electricity. His study focuses on the gendering of energy consumption in the domestic sphere, as well as the politics of energy use in the context of colonialism and Bengali nationalism.

Ewan Gibbs’ paper assesses lives in energy industries, focused on workers’ experiences in Britain’s coal and offshore oil and gas sector, as well as in nuclear and conventional power generation. Using oral histories that were structured around telling life stories, he examines how workers’ experiences incorporate reflections on local and national experiences of energy transitions. By concentrating on transition as a workplace and community experience, Gibbs studies how workers made sense of movements from one source of energy to the other and how they implicated themselves within larger processes of economic change. Through a contrast between experiences in the UK’s major energy sectors, this article also contributes to understanding of distinctions between labor regimes as well as the commonalities that underlay conceptions of what it meant to be British energy workers.

Anne Pasek’s contribution looks at how people see and sensorialize carbon. Pasek argues that while carbon is dominant in everyday life and industrial processes, it is not always visible. Her paper will look at the sensorial politics of carbon in carbon removal and sequestration, examining how the process is tied up in energy transitions more broadly. Pasek also seeks to examine the experiences of carbon removal workers and their emotional and affective stakes for the work they do. Her aim is to map their affective involvement in their work on behalf of the climate system. Pasek proposes to study these processes by bringing together the labor theory of value with affect theory.

Victoria Googasian will contribute a paper that explores a sub-genre of science fiction, the space opera. These literary works imagine human life centuries into the future and involve interplanetary and interstellar travel. Googasian explained that while space operas texts narrate human futures that depend on vast reserves of energy, they rarely explore questions of where the energy is to come from or what kinds of energy transitions may underwrite their worldbuilding. Instead, they maintain a fantasy of endless imperial expansion and human power over material environments. However, throughout the history of the genre, space opera also imagines characters who are materially embedded in their energy systems and characterized by embodied vulnerability. Taking these characters as a starting point, Googasian aims to study whether this seemingly reactionary genre might have an alternative energy imaginary that is grounded in humility, finitude, and limits of energetic life.

In order to generate new possibilities and identify connections between their scholarship, the group was divided into several smaller break-out sessions where participants were invited to deliberate on particular themes and concepts. In the first break-out session, the four paper contributors were asked to think through and highlight questions of time and space in relation to affect in their own work. For the second breakout session, the participants explored the theme of labor in regards to identity/subjectivity and values/structures. The last session focused specifically on transition and questions on modes of perception and narrative and obscurity. Finally, the participants reconvened as a complete group to share some of the main questions and takeaways from the break-out sessions and discuss how these will be developed and addressed in the final drafts of the paper contributions.

The second working group for the project will be held in September 2022, in which participants will discuss and get feedback on their draft papers.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Dominic Boyer, Rice University

Animesh Chatterjee, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow

Vicky Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar

Trish Kahle, Georgetown University in Qatar

Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Pasek, Trent University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CURA Paper Series Seminar
2022-08-01 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On April 9, 2020, CIRS held the CURA Paper Series Seminar with a presentation by Adithi Sanjay, a GU-Q junior majoring in International Politics, and the winner of the Spring 2020 CURA Paper Series Competition. The CURA program launched the competition under its paper series initiative, which allows selected research papers to be published after editorial review, feedback, and revisions. Sanjay’s paper, titled “The Creation and Mobilization of Anti-China Sentiment by Interest Groups in Indian Society (2012-2018),” was chosen as the winner of the competition from a competitive pool of submitted papers.

The winner of the competition had the opportunity to work with CIRS staff to elevate her research work with the goal of being published by the end of the semester. The seminar was organized to provide the student with professional development experience through presenting the paper to GU-Q peers and receiving their feedback. Due to COVID-19 related restrictions and to accommodate participants from various countries, Sanjay presented her research on anti-China sentiment in India via a Zoom meeting, which was attended by CURA fellows and CIRS staff.

Sanjay’s research methodology allowed for a micro-level analysis of the contemporary mobilization of anti-China protests in India. Using a global news monitoring and aggregation database that sourced more than 30,000 newspaper articles, she was able to compile a unique dataset cataloging anti-China protests on a state and regional level in India. The research scope covered anti-China protests from 2012 to 2018, a period spanning the incumbency of two Indian prime ministers as well as two military confrontations at the Sino-Indian border. Sanjay emphasized that anti-China sentiment in India has significant “implications for the level of [Sino-Indian] cooperation on economic, sociocultural, and political bases.” Her analysis focused on the six major drivers of anti-China sentiment that emerged as recurring themes across various anti-Chinese protest events: border tensions, economic tensions, religious tensions, historical and current oppression of Tibetans, Chinese support for Pakistan, and Chinese ministers’ visits to India.

Sanjay stated that “given the sheer size of the Indian population, [the] generalization of anti-China sentiment on a national level is problematic in that it glosses over the nuances of the issues driving public opinion of China in India,” As such, her research fills the gap in the preexisting literature on perceptions of China in India by analyzing the creation and mobilization of anti-China sentiment by three broad categories of stakeholders: non-political civil society organizations, political parties, and their affiliates, and the Indian central government.

The seminar began with the presenter’s remarks on the results and findings of her research and was followed by the question and answer portion that allowed for a fruitful discussion with every participant offering input. Sanjay shared that a limitation of her methodology is media bias, given that “small-size protests are not reported [in regional and national-level newspapers] and therefore considered ‘non-existent.’” As such, Sanjay suggested that data triangulation would enhance her research, as it would allow for the incorporation of ethnographic sources with her existing analysis of news reports. Sanjay concluded, “I enjoyed this experience, and I am grateful for all of your suggestions to improve on my paper and get it ready for publication.”

Sanjay’s winning paper will be published by CIRS in June 2020 and will be the inaugural paper published under the CURA Paper Series.

For the participants’ biographies, please click here

Article by J.I, CURA Research Fellow

CURA Seminar: Football in the Middle East
2022-08-01 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On March 19, 2020, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a CURA seminar under its Undergraduate Research Advancement program. This is an opportunity for CURA Fellows to discuss new articles from scholars who have submitted to CIRS’s regional research initiative on “Football in the Middle East.” In observing local regulations for the prevention of the spread of COVID-19, the seminar was hosted online through Zoom. Two papers were critiqued, and feedback from the CURA Fellows was gathered to later share with the research working group.

Khushboo Shah (class of 2022) opened the seminar by presenting Danyel Reiche’s paper “Playing in the triple periphery: Exclusionary policies towards Palestinian football in Lebanon.” The paper explores the development of policy toward Palestinian football players in Lebanon through a chronological survey of policies and interviews with scholars and players. The author describes a gradual restriction of Palestinian football players through a series of quotas and fees imposed to restrict their number. Through a comparative perspective, Reiche emphasizes the relative lack of opportunities and flexibility Palestinian players have in Lebanon compared to those in Israel and Jordan.

Chaïmaa Benkermi (class of 2021) led the second half of the seminar by presenting Thomas Ross Griffin’s “Who Kisses the Badge? The Player’s Perspective in the Performance of National Identity in the Qatar National Team.” Griffin uses literary and social media analysis to understand the performance of nationalism of players in the Qatari National Football team. The author divides the players into three categories: those who were born Qatari (jus sanguinis), non-Qataris born in Qatar (jus soli), and naturalized players from Europe and North Africa (jus talenti). Griffin argues that players from all three groups express Qatari nationalism in similar ways despite their different origins, particularly in their embrace of the image of the Emir and the anthem Shoomila Shoomila.

Following the presentations, CURA fellow engaged in an in-depth discussion about the structure, theoretical framework, sources, and clarity and strength of each paper. While analyzing the papers’ significance to the current scholarship of Football in the Middle East, CURA fellows use the research and analytical skills they learn on the job and through various CURA activities to contribute to their assessments.

Following the seminar, Salma Hassabou (class of 2022) and Shaza Afifi (class of 2022) will serve as ambassadors to present the comments to the working group on “Football in the Middle East,” which will be held on a virtual platform in early April.

For the participants’ biographies, please click here

Article by Ngoc Nguyen, CURA Research Fellow

Global Histories and Practices of Islamophobia Working Group I
2022-08-08 17:00 - 2022-08-09 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
On August 8 and 9, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) organized the first research meeting under its initiative on Global Histories and Practices of Islamophobia. The meeting was held as a virtual event, with scholars participating from various geographical locations. The meeting aimed to discuss the submitted abstract proposals, which were solicited through a Call for Papers and submissions by invited scholars. The convened academics and experts from various multi-disciplinary backgrounds discussed issues related to global Islamophobia beyond the question of war on terror and fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims post 9/11.The conversation was initiated by Anne Norton, who argued that despite Western political thought relying upon Muslim philosophy, it was often figured only as an allusive erasure in portrayals of the canonical. The palimpsest formed by this layering of influences and erasures conceals and reveals the place of Muslim thought, philosophical and religious, in Western religion and philosophy. The objective of the paper will work to articulate the constitutive effects of this palimpsest. Along with the sequestration of Muslim thought in politics and philosophy, the paper will show how the West bounded and confined aspects of its own intellectual inquiries. Norton will diagnose the effects of an Enlightenment settlement that foreclosed both a full engagement with thinking about the divine in the West.Salman Sayyid shifted the discussion to the question of the emergence of the Islamophobic State. He argued that there was a need to broaden the geography and deepen the history to understand Islamophobia. The term is often understood as a problem that applies to Muslim minorities but not to Muslim majority states. The emergence of an Islamophobic state, which is a specific form of state, has a distinct ensemble of institutions and administrative processes and covers an astonishing range of political forms. The Islamophobic State not only targets expressions of Muslimness but in its efforts to discipline the Muslims, builds up an internationally sanctioned system of surveillance and restriction, which can be easily applied to other social actors. The paper will aim to explain this emergence of the Islamophobic State as a project to rewrite social contracts and transform relations between the ruled and the rulers. The question of self-determination in relation to Islamophobia in Indian-Occupied Kashmir was raised by Hafsa Kanjwal. She stated that the development of Islamophobia in India is a combined result of both secular-liberal and Hindutva ideologies. While secularism is used in India to forcibly depoliticize Muslim identity, Hindutva views Muslims as being subservient to the Hindu identity of the nation. Using the example of Occupied Kashmir, the paper will look at how the relevance of Islam is dismissed as a category for the modern state and how the state attempts to subvert Muslim agency and self-determination. The main argument made was that the essential character of Indian nationalism is Islamophobic, which not only erases Muslim markers in public sites and normalizes violence and bigotry toward Muslims, but also views the Muslim demand for sovereignty or self-determination with suspicion and as a rejection of the liberal secular nation-state order.Shereen Fernandez then directed the conversion to examine the sea as a site for practices of Islamophobia. She argued that there is a gap in the literature that neglects to examine how the sea has been used as a space to practice Islamophobia. To fill this gap, her paper will look at the historical practices of transporting Muslim prisoners, by the British in the 1850s, to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands on a ship and study their experiences as colonial convicts. The latter part of the paper will link this history to the Islamophobia experienced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) during the War on Terror post 9/11. With this contribution, Fernandez aims to explore the centrality of the sea as a site which perpetuates the spatialization of Islamophobia as exemplified in the treatment of Muslim prisoners.Oli Charbonneau’s discussion examined the role of Islam and manifestations of Islamophobia in the Colonial Philippines from 1899 to the 1920s. He argued that prejudicial thinking about Muslims in the region is the result of several discourses. These resulted in systematic control over the Muslim population via militarized violence and cultural-political overhaul. Charbonneau’s paper will aim to study the archival materials from U.S. foreign relations, Philippine Studies; and Islamic Southeast Asian Studies to illustrate the contemporary American ideas about and actions towards Islamic societies. Using Southern Philippines as a case study Charbonneau will also aim to present Islamophobia in Southeast Asia as a set of beliefs rather than a uniform practice.Valentin Duquet led the discussion on Islamophobia in “Algerianist” settler colonial literature which came out in the first half of the 1900s. During this era, Algeria was a region of the French Republic. Analyzing three “pied-noir” novels of the Interwar period as historical archives, his paper will examine the representation of the Muslim native, which Duquet explains is key to understanding Islamophobia under French colonialism as well as its brutal unwinding a few decades later. In these novels, the Muslim figures are often relegated to the background, erased, or replaced with “Berber” characters which are often Christian, pagan, or vaguely Mediterranean. This erasure, he argues, is symptomatic of the symbolic violence of French assimilation which denied even the name “Algerian” from Maghrebi Muslims.Ali Alsmadi discussed the role of Spanish Islam and highlighted the treatment of the Moriscos’ literature in the scholarship. Alsmadi argued that Islam is viewed by the orientalist scholars as an imported religion and not part of indigenous Spanish culture and heritage. In his paper, Alsmadi will shed light on the current political denial to recognize the Moriscos’ language and literature which is deeply rooted in past practices. His analysis will demonstrate how the 19th and 20th-century scholarship and its understanding of the Moriscos were biased and show literary and cultural linkages between Morisco literature and contemporary Spanish authors that reflect cross-religious influences that are unique to the Iberian Peninsula.First Oruc then shifted the focus of the discussion to Islamophobia in Turkey and the fear of Islam in the Turkish Republican era. Oruc narrated that after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist founding elites and the Turkish intelligentsia claimed Islam to be a “spiritual malaise” from which the Turkish nation had to recover. Their concept of modern Turkey envisioned the adoption of Westernizing state nationalism. The Ottoman era was viewed as the repression of the Turk and Turkish cultural values, with Islam seen as the main threat to Turkey’s emergence as a modern republic state. Through examining Turkish cultural and literary texts Oruc aims to explore the historical manifestation of fear of Islam and its aftermaths in Turkey and also examine how some of the similar paradigms of Islamophobia may reoccur in other Muslim majority societies.Thomas Simsarian Dolan addressed the question of “Arab Money” and Global capitalism. Dolan argued that in the selective economic discourse, Muslims are seen as non-normative economic actors. This form of Islamophobia, Dolan stated, builds on Orientalist theory that deepened during the Cold War, and labels Muslims as a security threat to the Western financial system in need of economic and political discipline. Adding to the existing work of scholars such as Deepa Kumar, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Mahmood Mamdani, Dolan and his co-author Zaynab Quadri aim to explore this strand of Islamophobia by tracing the transnational political economies in which both the flow of global capital and people are simultaneously curtailed.

Muneeza Rizvi highlighted contestations over the Palestinian struggle being characterized as an “Islamic issue.” She focused on voices that, on one hand, are critical of the orientalist accounts that portray the creation of Israel as a feud between Muslims and Jews, and on the other, suggest that the designation “Islamic” necessarily excludes other analytical framings of the issue, such as settler colonialism. Rizvi argued that secular assumptions about politics and religion structure these colloquial debates, as well as parallel academic trajectories within Middle East Studies.Farid Hafez directed the discussion toward the geopolitics of Islamophobia and stated that the notion of political Islam has been used by centrist governments in Europe to exclude Muslims from the public sphere, silence critical voices, and crack down on Muslim communities. This discourse is an extension of the narrative on countering extremism and the global war on terror. Hafez aims to study how attempts to silence Muslims transcends beyond the West. Using a geopolitical lens, he will look into UAE’s attempts to shape the discourse on domesticating Muslims in Europe and US and into pro-Israeli interest in cracking down on Muslim political agency in the West. He will try to draw linkages and differences between these practices and Islamophobia in Europe.Abdullah Arian shared Sanober Umar’s thoughts on race-making and religion in colonial and post-colonial India. The participants were encouraged to deliberate over issues such as; prevailing colonial attitudes towards Islam in India, the use of religion to differentiate between Hindus and Muslims as separate “races” and the viewing of Muslims as being dangerous and barbaric compared to Hindus who could be co-opted into the British colonial system.The participants will take the constructive feedback their abstracts received and begin writing draft papers, which will be circulated among the group before the second working group meeting. At the subsequent meeting, scholars will critique each other’s papers and provide in-depth commentary.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Abdullah Al-Arian, Georgetown University in Qatar

Ali Alsmadi, Indiana University Bloomington, US

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Oli Charbonneau, University of Glasgow

Thomas Simsarian Dolan, American University in Cairo

Valentin Duquetis, University of Texas at Austin

Shereen Fernandez, London School of Economics and Political Science

Farid Hafez, Georgetown University

Hafsa Kanjwalis, Lafayette College

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania

Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar

Zaynab Quadri, Ohio State University

Muneeza Rizvi, University of California, Berkeley

Salman Sayyid, University of Leeds

Sanober Umar, York University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Karine Walther, Georgetown University in Qatar

Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CURA Workshop: Writing Women into Wikipedia: Information Creation and Peer Review
2022-08-11 13:00 - 2022-08-18 15:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On August 11 and 18, 2022, CIRS hosted a two-part workshop for undergraduate students titled, “Writing Women into Wikipedia: Information Creation and Peer Review.” The workshop was offered under the CIRS Undergraduate Research Advancement (CURA) Program, and was co-led by GU-Q Faculty Professor Phoebe Musandu, and Paschalia Terzi, GU-Q Librarian.

This workshop taught me to create and edit the websites, but also learn to respect other works as well by giving valuable and reasonable feedback while making the necessary edits/suggestions. Throughout this process, I got to further develop my research skills, especially when you need to find out an information about someone who is not well known in online platforms when you try researching in English.
– Nafisa Sagdullaeva, GU-Q Class of 2026

Over the course of two days, 15 Georgetown University in Qatar and Northwestern University in Qatar students learned about the information creation and peer review process using Wikipedia articles as a model. The workshop was adapted by Terzi from a recent project report published in the Journal of Information Literacy (Thomas, Jones & Mattingly, 2021). Professor Musandu opened the workshop with a presentation contextualizing the themes and goals of the workshop in the bigger picture of the bias that is presented in Wikipedia. Her presentation highlighted the importance of analyzing information sources to determine whose voices are represented, and whose are being left out.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that relies on a community of editors to create, revise, and remove articles from the website based on Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. It is a common misperception that anyone can write or edit anything on Wikipedia at any time without oversight. While this is true to an extent, what is often not known is that every article and edit is reviewed by experienced Wikipedia editors who will remove the edits or article itself if found to be outside of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. Information presented in Wikipedia articles should be from a neutral point of view, verifiable, and not original research.

Professor Musandu explained how bias enters into Wikipedia – evidenced not only in the authors and subjects of articles, but also within the community of editors. Since Wikipedia’s guidelines require all information in articles to be verifiable, only secondary sources may be used to source articles. Professor Musandu explained why this can be an issue – authors of secondary sources may insert their own biases into their work, which is then replicated in the Wikipedia article. Secondary sources reflect the social norms, mores, and values that were evident at the time of writing, thus perpetuating the biases through generations.

I learnt how I can critically review the articles posted on Wikipedia, and post my own and ultimately become a Wikipedian.
– Zarrish Ahmed, GU-Q Class of 2026

In this workshop, students focused on the underrepresentation of women in the world of Wikipedia. Regarding the content of Wikipedia itself, women are underrepresented in articles. Within articles themselves, how women are represented is often very narrow and reduced to their role in relationship to a male, or relegated to matters of social and purely feminine affairs, advancing unhelpful stereotypes. For example, in the Wikipedia article “Women in Qatar,” the first sentence is “Women’s rights in Qatar are restricted by the country’s male guardianship law and influenced by the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam” (Wikipedia, 2022).

Women are also underrepresented in the community of Wikipedia editors. In addition to the fewer number of women editors, Shane-Simpson and Gillespie-Lynch (2017) suggest five reasons for the gender gap, including the inclination of women to discuss more and edit content less, perception and interaction with other editors, and gender issues in quantity of leisure time available. This is why the workshop focused specifically on women and Wikipedia. It is the hope of the facilitators that students will choose to become Wikipedia editors themselves.

After the presentation, students worked in groups to write articles about Qatari women in the fields of politics, science, education, art, and business. During the second session on August 18, the facilitators gave each group the article of another group in an anonymous manner to review in a peer review exercise. At the end of the two-part Workshop, students had the opportunity to publish their articles and engage with the global community of Wikipedia editors on their biographical contributions. As Anupa Khanal, GU-Q class of 2026 stated after the workshop, “I would like to devote more time on writing articles on women who are unrepresented and also work on peer reviews.”

Watch a video of the presentation by Professor Phoebe Musandu and Paschalia Terzi here.

Article by Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS Operations Manager

Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game
2022-08-15 18:00 - 19:30 (Asia/Qatar)
A tour d’horizon exploring how the world’s best-loved game is affecting people, societies and governments across the region.

Far and away the most popular sport in the world, football has a special place in Middle Eastern societies, and for Middle Eastern states. With Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this region has been cast into the global footballing spotlight, raising issues of geopolitical competition, consumer culture and social justice.

Panelists: Zahra Babar (Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar), Ross Griffin (Qatar University), Craig LaMay (Northwestern University in Qatar), and Danyel Reiche (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Moderator: Abdullah Al-Arian (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Location: 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum

The World Cup and Women's Empowerment in Qatar
2022-08-29 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In 2010, Qatar was chosen to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Only two years later in 2012, the first Qatari woman competed in the Olympic Games. This panel discussion will look at the impact of hosting the first World Cup in the Middle East on women’s participation in sports, as well as their rights and lived experiences in the country.

Panelists: Zarqa Parvez Abdullah (Georgetown University in Qatar), Afraa Al-Noaimi (Josoor Institute), Susan Dun (Northwestern University in Qatar)

Moderator: Danyel Reiche (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

Affects of Energy Transition Working Group II
2022-09-05 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On September 5, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies held a second working group under its research initiative on Energy Humanities. The meeting was organized as a hybrid event, which allowed for both in-person and virtual participation. The convened scholars received critical feedback and commentary on the draft chapters that they had submitted prior to the meeting.

Animesh Chatterjee initiated the discussion with his paper titled, “Everyday Experiences of Energy in Colonial Calcutta’s Domestic Spheres, c. 1875-1940s.” He explained that in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta, appeared in Calcutta as both a source of illumination in public and domestic spaces, and as a complex metaphor in the intellectual articulations of contemporary social and political thoughts. Using the metaphor of braiding, Chatterjee’s article provides a contemporary recollection of colonial and nationalist debates over electric use in domestic and public spaces and looks at ways in which historical narratives influence these affective engagements. The paper examines and analyzes differing positions of address and representations of electricity both as a symbol of material and cultural progress, and as a symbol of “Western” modernity and material culture harmful to the Bengali individual, family, and society. Overall, the paper highlights how electricity accentuated heterogenous views on modernity, nationalism, and culture within Bengali society.

Ewan Gibbs then led a discussion on his paper, “Lives in Energy: Understanding Testimonies from Britain’s Coal, Power, and Oil Sectors.” Gibbs argued that across various energy sectors, including coal, oil, gas, and nuclear, workers engaged in energy generation have a common view of their centrality to the British economy but also share a sense of invisibility in dominant public debates. These trends have magnified through the privatization of electricity since the 1990s, concurrent with the broader impacts of deindustrialization, which have left skilled manual workers peripheral to Britain’s economic imaginary. This paper addresses the role of labor in energy histories using worker testimonies collected in life-story oral histories from Scotland, England, and Wales. Gibbs aims to shed light on workplace experiences since the middle of the twentieth century, a period marked by major changes in Britain’s energy economy including the building of large new power stations under public ownership, the contracting significance of coal mining and burning, and the beginning and maturing of new form of generation including North Sea oil and gas extraction and the nuclear project. His paper assesses how workers in varied energy sectors constructed their relationship to their workplace and locality and dealt with the contradictory affective dimensions of place attachment.

Anne Pasek shifted the discussion to contemporary energy affects with her paper, “Unalienating Carbon: Affect and Labor in Emerging Carbon Sequestration Markets’ Theories of Value.” Her article looks at the process of carbon removal, particularly in the biochar and regenerative agriculture communities. Using the framework of affect and work Pasek argues that carbon removal in these industries is effortful, manual, and impactful. Through their labor, practitioners not only bring tangible changes in the landscapes and materials they work with but are themselves affected by the work they do to intervene in the climate system. Using the documentary media produced about the artisanal communities, as the source material, Pasek’s paper explains how affect plays a central role in both driving and sustaining the work done by these communities and how it shapes their apprehensions and relations to the carbon cycle.

Victoria Googasian then discussed her paper titled, “Infrastructural Character: Space Opera’s Energetic Imaginary.” Using three space operas examples–Star Trek Discovery, Dune, and Nova–as case studies, Googasian’s paper explores how these texts diverge from the genre’s tropes of endless imperial expansion and human power over material environments. These novels imagine human futures that depend on vast reserves of energy, but they depict characters who are materially embedded in their energy systems and are characterized by embodied vulnerability. The three texts are used to further examine the role of these infrastructural characters during the energy transitions taking place in these literary works.

The participants will revise their draft papers based on the feedback received during the discussions. CIRS will work with the faculty leads of the project, Professors Firat Oruc, Trish Kahle, and Victoria Googasian to submit the final for publication as a journal special issue.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Animesh Chatterjee, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow

Vicky Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar

Trish Kahle, Georgetown University in Qatar

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Pasek, Trent University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

Football and the State in the Middle East
2022-09-13 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow)
This panel discussion was the second event being hosted to highlight the research conducted under CIRS project Football in the Middle East, the outcome of which is a new book edited by Professor Abdullah Al-Arian published by Hurst/Oxford University Press. The panel looks at how football is affecting states, governments, and societies across the region.

Moderator: Suzi Mirgani (Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar)

Panelists: Niki Akhavan (The Catholic University of America), Craig LaMay (Northwestern University in Qatar), and Abdullah Al-Arian (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

Russian Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East
2022-09-21 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Moderated by GUQ Professor Mehran Kamrava, the event discusses Russia’s motives in the Middle East, examining its growing role in the region and its efforts to defend its national interests. The discussion addresses both domestic and external drivers of Moscow’s foreign policy, tracing the historical evolution of Russia’s presence in the region within the last 30 years.

Speaker: Nikolay Kozhanov – Qatar University

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center Working Group II
2022-09-25 08:00 - 2022-09-26 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On September 25 and 26, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies held the second working group under its research initiative, “Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center.” The meeting convened regional and international scholars who discussed their draft papers and received extensive feedback for revisions. The topics discussed at the meeting included Qatar Airways sponsorships, Paris Saint Germain and national identity, the World Cup and efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle in Qatar, Corporate Social Responsibility, the blockade of 2017, COVID-19 preparedness, and Qatar’s foreign policy in relation to the World Cup 2022.

Danyel Reiche initiated the discussion with his chapter, “The Perception of Qatar Airways Sponsorships in Major European Football Clubs.” Reiche’s paper analyzed Qatar Airways’ sponsorships of three major European football clubs: FC Barcelona, FC Bayern Munich, and FC Paris Saint-Germain, and discussed how sponsorship arrangements have been perceived by different stakeholders in the three clubs. Outlining Qatar Airways’ sports sponsorship portfolio, Reiche argued that over the years Qatar’s standing has become stronger at the elite levels of European football but more work needs to be done at the grassroots level. The chapter provides deeper insight into why these sponsorships were and remain controversial, and whether Qatar has used these sports sponsorships effectively to gain soft power.

Andreas Flouris’s chapter addresses whether being awarded the World Cup has prompted Qatar to focus on policies and programs to support a healthy lifestyle in the country. In his chapter, “The 2022 FIFA World Cup and the Quest for Healthy Living in Qatar,” Flouris suggests that while the World Cup has led to economic and infrastructural development in the country, it remains to be seen whether the initiatives carried out as part of the World Cup preparation will have a longer-term impact on the adoption of a healthy lifestyle by the population.

Continuing the discussion on health-related issues, Kamilla Swart briefly updated the group on her chapter which will be examining the World Cup 2022 and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Her paper will look at other mega sporting events hosted by Qatar during the pandemic, and how these supported Qatar’s efforts to deliver a safe and secure World Cup in 2022.

Ross Griffin’s chapter, “Identity Matters: Qatar, QSI, and Paris Saint-Germain” focuses on Qatari national identity expressed through the ownership of the French football club. Ross argues that after its purchase by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011, Paris Saint German was transformed into one of the most glamorous football clubs in the world, with high levels of success. Ross states that there is a significant absence of academic work on Qatar’s motivations in purchasing PSG, and how ownership of the club has enabled the state to engage in national identity performance on the global stage. In his chapter, Ross examines the forms of national identity that Qatar is performing through its ownership of PSG, how this identity is performed, and why PSG serves as the desired medium for performing this identity.

Uday Chandra and Aisha Al-Kuwari’s chapter, “Popular Culture and the World Cup,” focuses on football fandom and popular culture in Doha. Using vernacular sources and interviews they argue that the evolution of football fandom in Doha can be best understood through historic neighborhood clubs, known as furjan, and through the culture of football spectatorship in the Qatari majaalis. The paper’s secondary intervention is in its highlighting of the voices of the migrant communities present in Doha, their expressions of inclusion and participation in the World Cup, as well as their broader forms of patriotism to the country. By bringing both the citizen and migrant dimensions together, this contribution explores how local popular culture in Doha shapes and is shaped by the World Cup.

The next session was led by Irene Theodoropoulou on her chapter, “Good Things Come from Small Places: Communicating Qatar to World Cup Tourists.” The paper examines the discursive and linguistic means through which the World Cup 2022 is communicated to the world. Theodoropoulou detailed the three phases of the communication strategy, “Expect Amazing”, “Deliver Amazing”, and “Now is All.” She argued that Qatar has employed the three phases not only to tackle the negative image but also to put itself on the global tourist map, to rebrand itself, and to establish tourism as one of its basic revenue sectors post World Cup in order to diversify its economy.

Sebastian Sons paper, “Creating Sports Humanitarianism: The Nexus of Qatar’s Development Assistance and Sport,” analyzed Qatar’s efforts to link its humanitarian aid policy with sports. Sons stated that Qatar has emerged as a relevant provider of development assistance in recent years, and has made sport an integral part of its developmental aid. In doing so, Qatar has aimed to present itself as a promoter of humanitarianism, physical activity, and a healthy lifestyle. It also seeks to compete with regional neighbors such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which are also following a similar policy in terms of sports development. Sons paper focuses on Qatar’s developmental policy and its close interlinkages with sport, and aims to contribute to the academic discussion on sport as a driver for development.

Paul Brannagan led a session discussion on “Soft Power as ‘Beauty, Brilliance, Benignity’: the Case of the Aspire Zone Elite Sports.” Brannagan’s paper aims to provide an analysis of Qatar’s state-of-the-art elite sports complex, Aspire Zone. Using the lens of ‘beauty’, ‘brilliance’ and ‘benignity,’ he discussed how this elite athlete complex generates soft power for Qatar so far and will add to it post World Cup ear. Building on previous academic works on Aspire Zone, the paper examines how Qatar has used soft power to carve out an attractive global profile in global sports.

Kathy Babiak’s paper, “FIFA World Cup 2022: The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility as a Vehicle for Qatar’s Development Goals,” looked at the CSR of the key stakeholders responsible for organizing the World Cup in Qatar. Babiak discussed the concept of CSR and its link to firm strategy and national development. She argued that sport has been used to drive broader strategic development goals by all types of businesses, rights holders, organizing committees, sports organizations, and nations around the world. International sports governing bodies such as FIFA, sports sponsors, and other interested parties have amplified the global business of sports and have used the power of sports to influence positive social change. Babiak’s contribution will aim to examine and better understand how CSR is enacted by local and international stakeholders of mega events such as the World Cup, and how it can help to advance social change and position firms, sports organizations, and even host countries as positive agents of social impact.

Hissa Al-Kubaisi shifted the discussion to Qatar’s foreign policy with her paper, “The World Cup and Shifts in Qatar’s Foreign Policy.” Al-Kubaisi stated that the academic literature on small states claims that a change in leadership does not have an effect on the foreign policies of small states. She argued against this concept and specified that in the case of Qatar there was a strong shift in foreign policy after 2010 which can be associated with two events, the awarding of hosting the FIFA World Cup 2022 in 2010 and the change in leadership in 2013. The paper will examine how, following a change in leadership in the run-up to the FIFA World Cup 2022, Qatar’s foreign policy has shifted to and is now based on mediation and diplomacy, which is more aligned with the values of the World Cup.

The working group discussion was brought to a close by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, who presented his paper, “Qatar: Between the Blockade and the World Cup?” Ulrichen’s chapter looked at the 2017 blockade of Qatar by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt and examined how the blockade affected Qatar’s preparations for the World Cup. He analyzed the steps that were undertaken by policymakers in Qatar to overcome the domestic, regional, and international challenges that arose in and after 2017. Outlining the aspects of the blockade and the ways it intersected with the World Cup preparations, the paper explores issue of political risk and the climate of uncertainty created by the blockading states and the measures that were implemented to strengthen Qatar’s domestic resilience and to solidify its regional and international partnerships. Finally, it looks at the legacy of the blockade and the twelve-year-long World Cup preparations.

The contributors will revise their paper drafts based on the feedback received. CIRS will gather the final chapter submissions into an edited volume to be published by a university press.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Aisha Al Kuwari, Georgetown University in Qatar

Hissa Al Kubaisi, Georgetown University in Qatar

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Kathy Babiak, University of Michigan

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Paul Brannagan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Susan Dun, Northwestern University in Qatar

Uday Chandra, Georgetown University in Qatar

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Rice University

Andreas Flouris, University of Ottawa

Ross Griffin, Qatar University

Craig LaMay, Northwestern University in Qatar

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Nebel, Georgetown University in Qatar

Zarqa Parvez, Georgetown University in Qatar

Danyel Reiche, Georgetown University in Qatar

Sebastian Sons, Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO)

Kamilla Swart, Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU)

Irene Theodoropoulou, Qatar University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CIRS Lunch Talk: The Beautiful Game in America
2022-10-16 13:00 - 14:00 (Asia/Qatar)
Speaker: Andrew Guest (University of Portland in Oregon USA)

Moderator: Danyel Reiche (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

Energy and the World Cup
2022-10-17 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
This special panel is hosted as part of CIRS and GUQ’s research focus on Qatar and the FIFA World Cup 2022, and addresses issues related to energy and the hosting of the tournament. In this panel, we consider what lessons and avenues the World Cup 2022 offers for the energy humanities in the Gulf region and beyond. How does this event and its legacy speak to the issue of mega-event infrastructures and energy culture?

Moderators: Firat Oruc and Victoria Googasian (Georgetown University in Qatar)

Panelists: Danyel Reiche (Georgetown University in Qatar), Gokce Gunel (Rice University), and Laurent Lambert (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

UNDP Human Development Report 2021/2022
2022-10-18 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow)
This panel is the country launch for the 2021-2022 UNDP Human Development Report. The report authors will discuss how to understand and navigate today’s uncertainty complex as explored in the report – driven by the Anthropocene, by purposeful societal transformation, and by intensifying polarization. Distinguished panelists will reflect on the report’s implications for Qatar, the broader region, and the world.

Opening Remarks: H.E. Dr. Saleh bin Mohammad Al Nabit (Planning and Statistics Authority)

Panelists: Dr. Safwan Masri (Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar), Pedro Conceição (United Nations Development Program), Sheikha Hanouf Abdulrahman N. J. Al-Thani (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Dr. Mohamed Eskandar Shah (Hamad bin Khalifa University)

Moderators: Biplove Chaudhary (United Nations Development Program) and Zahra Babar (Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar

A World Cup for Qatar or the Middle East?
2022-10-24 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In 2010, Qatar won the bid to become the first ever Middle Eastern and Arab country to host a FIFA World Cup. Even though all 32 teams will be hosted in Qatar and all 64 games will be played in local stadiums, the state is emphasizing the broader regional character of the event. Join us for a panel discussion on the tournament’s impact on neighboring countries and its effect on regional relations.

Moderator: Suzi Mirgani (Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar)

Panelists: Danyel Reiche (Georgetown University in Qatar), Hissa Al-Kubaisi (Georgetown University in Qatar – Alumna), Irene Theodoropoulou (Qatar University)

Location: CIRS Conference Room, Georgetown University in Qatar
