Future Digital Research on/in/from the Middle East

Akram Khater (NC State) began with describing his experience and challenges with building an archive of the stories of Arab immigrants, stressing how an archive must follow both the lives of the immigrants and the lives of those who they left. He ended by asking how we address the silences of the archive: the absence of people who were not privileged enough to write, record, and leave things behind.

Marina Rustow (Princeton) emphasized the need for digital works to be accessible in the places they originally come from. However, for her digitization is not a magic solution. Rather, it is an opening to formulate new ways of workflow and collaboration that often do not map onto the infrastructural demands of traditional academic institutions worldwide.

David Joseph Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi) first focused on how "with" is largely missing in the area studies lexicon. He stressed the need for fostering modes of transnational collaboration while also addressing the possible uneven relations. He identified infrastructural difference as a new site of privilege, asking how do we center new infrastructures and ways of working with information?

Jared McCormick (NYU) concluded by asking the scholars to think through the preposition "with." The speakers discussed the challenges of institutionalizing new understandings and standards for academic labor for faculty and students. They also stressed infrastructure as a modelling process that can allow for others worldwide to work with us, thus creating new possibilities.

This virtual event was co-sponsored by 19 Washington Square North and the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies.