Lightning Talks: Junior Scholars Present Digital Scholarship in Progress

Project: "Utilizing Digital Humanities in Engaging K-12 Educators on Learning and Teaching the Middle East." How can scholars demystify and de-orientalize the ways the public learns and talks about the Middle East, beyond higher education? This talk discusses a course geared toward introducing K-12 teachers to the modern Middle East, helping them integrate their new knowledge into classroom instruction.

Project: "Colonial Cartography in Palestine-Israel and the Decolonising Potential of Counter-Maps." Examines historical and contemporary practices of mapping in Palestine-Israel within frameworks of critical cartography, settler colonialism, and decolonisation. Interrogates how Palestinian space has been represented in cartography since 1850, and what decolonisation looks like in practice.

Project: "Access and Allyship: Deaf-Hearing Relations in a Jordanian Facebook Group." Examines questions of access and allyship through virtual ethnography of a Facebook group focused on deafness, sign language, and inclusion in Jordan — exploring how technologically-mediated communication shapes the content and form of contemporary social discourses.

Project: "Digital Guide to Theatre of the Middle East." Explores the challenges and rewards of creating a digital database of Middle Eastern theatre — as an impossible task, a labor of love, and a transnational collaboration.

Project: "Regenerate Hub: Building Cross-Sector Connectivity Between Crises and Collaboration." Digital scholarship motivated by two questions: how is inequality maintained by natural and built environments, and how do people improve community well-being by changing these environments? Introduces a collaborative digital research project exploring these questions in Lebanon through data aggregation, visualization, and resource sharing tools.

Project: "Mapping the Digital Iran Project: Reimagining Collaboration and Theory Using Twitch.TV." For the multiplatform 'Digital Iran' project, collaborators analyzed the construction of narratives and counternarratives of Iranian culture and identity in video games through affect and feminist theory, live-streaming gameplay on Twitch.TV and creating video essay shorts.

Project: "Tracking Snow Plows in Ankara." Examines encounters with technological iteration in municipal communications infrastructures. Using vignettes from central Turkey (2013–2018), the talk traces evolutions in Ankara-based magazines, apps, and video sources — and asks how the nature of the digital forces researchers to reconsider their notions of 'field.'