E436 | In this roundtable entitled "Narrating Migration: Emerging Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Directions," held at the 2019 Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, two historians--Reem Bailony and Andrew Arsan--and two sociologists--Rawan Arar and Neda Maghbouleh discuss their experiences and approaches to studying migration. Throughout this conversation with our four authors about their own research, we speak to the following questions: What are the promises and dangers of narrative in migration studies? What role do language and affect play in writing migrant stories? How should we write them? How do different disciplines approach migration? What challenges and possibilities are presented by the source base? How do various sources (e.g., state, personal, oral) intersect or diverge? What are overlooked areas (e.g., spatial, temporal, political, social) with regard to migration and the modern Middle East? How do experiences of MENA migration and diaspora contribute to migration studies broadly speaking? How does this work impact historiographies of the Global North, South-South relations, and other places where MENA migrants have gone? What promise might the study of MENA migration hold for decolonial scholarship?
More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/11/narrating-migration-mesa-2019.html
Rawan Arar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California San Diego and postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Rawan studies refugee displacement, international migration, and rights.
Andrew Arsan teaches modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014), and of Lebanon: A Country in Fragments (2018, paperback edition forthcoming 2020), a study of everyday life and politics in contemporary Lebanon.
Reem Bailony is Assistant Professor of History at Agnes Scott College. She is working on a book about the transnational context of the 1925 Syrian Revolt.
Neda Maghbouleh (@nedasoc) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with graduate appointment to the St. George campus. She is author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017) and Principal Investigator of a longitudinal study (2018-2023) of Syrian refugee resettlement in Toronto titled RISE Team: Refugee Integration, Stress, & Equity.
CREDITS
Episode No. 436
Release Date: 25 November 2019
Recording Location: Harvard University
Music: Ketsa - Life Illusion; Tanious Hamlawe - Tabouly
Audio editing by Chris Gratien
Reading lists courtesy of roundtable participants available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/11/narrating-migration-mesa-2019.html
view more