“This conference is an invitation to explore the notion of ‘Global South,’ which has become a popular designation for a complex web of geographies, conditions, relationships, and orientations that used to be captured by terms such as ‘Third World’ or ‘developing countries.’ From a range of disciplines and locations, leading scholars on the topic will examine what the notion does, what it enables, what it forecloses, as well as how it affects our understanding of the societies, cultures, histories, and media systems not only in the so-called Global South but across the world.” Marwan M. Kraidy, dean and CEO of Northwestern Qatar said.
The conference will open with a conversation between Sari Hanafi, professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut and a leading thinker on knowledge production in the Arab world, Elizabeth Kassab, an associate professor of philosophy from the Doha Institute specializing in post-colonial philosophy and Arab thought, and Anne Garland Mahler, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, and a key scholar of South-to-South solidarity movements. This conversation will be moderated by NU-Q professor and director of the Liberal Arts Program, Sami Hermez, whose research focuses on social movements, the state, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab world.
The #IAS_NUQ launch conference will be held in conjunction with the next installment of Northwestern University in Qatar’s Dean’s Global Forum, a signature series of lectures that features eminent leaders from academe, the media, the arts, and public affairs in conversations with Dean Kraidy. Resonating with the theme of the IAS conference, this Dean’s Global Forum will feature Professor Prathama Banerjee, a historian and political theorist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India, widely recognized as one of the leading intellectual institutions in the Global South and the world at large. Banerjee is a prolific scholar whose latest book, Elementary Aspects of the Political (Duke University Press, 2020), draws on detailed archival work in India to rethink modern conceptions of ‘the political’ from the perspectives of the Global South. She will also be featured as a panelist on the second day of the #IAS_NUQ conference.
“This conference is an invitation to explore the notion of ‘Global South,’ which has become a popular designation for a complex web of geographies, conditions, relationships, and orientations that used to be captured by terms such as ‘Third World’ or ‘developing countries”
Day two of the conference comprises three panels, organized thematically. One panel will focus on the ‘histories of the global south.’ In addition to Banerjee, this panel will include NU-Q Professor Hasan Mahmud, a scholar of race and migration in Bangladesh, and Professor Abdullah Al-Arian, a historian from Georgetown University in Qatar, specializing on modern Egypt, Islamic social movements, and the history of US policy towards the Middle East. A second panel will examine ‘epistemologies from the Global South’ featuring Professor Sari Hanafi (American University of Beirut), NU-Q Professor Haya Al-Noaimi, who focused on gender and militarism in the Gulf region, and Yasemin Celikkol, global postdoctoral scholar at NU-Q.
The closing panel will question the histories and continued relevance of Southern solidarities and will feature Anne Garland Mahler, Nabil Echchaibi, associate professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose research and teaching focus on media, religion, and the politics and poetics of Muslim visibility, and Alex Lubin, professor of African American studies and history at Penn State University, where he studies the transnational history of the African Diaspora in the Middle East/North Africa. Each of the three panels will feature NU-Q faculty as discussants.
Clovis Bergère, assistant director for research at NU-Q, said that the conference, the first major in-person event at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, will help establish Northwestern University in Qatar and the broader region as a leading center for research relevant to the societies, cultures, histories, and media of the Global South. “Bringing leading scholars shaping the conversation on and in the Global South, this conference will expand our understanding of the notion and help us reflect on its continued relevance for research, knowledge, and storytelling not only in the region but globally,” he said.
The conference is one of many programs and initiatives organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, which promotes evidence-based storytelling focused on the histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South. As a catalyst of academic excellence and collaboration, the Institute has hosted several events convening teams of leading multidisciplinary scholars with expertise on the Global South, including a Critical Conversations Series featuring Northwestern faculty from Qatar and Evanston.
#IAS_NUQ's conference, What's the Global South? Histories, epistemologies, and solidarities, is open to the public. Register now to attend.
