Biographies
Ahmad Gharbieh (AUB)
Ahmad Gharbieh is Assistant Professor in the graphic design program at the Department of Architecture and Design, American University of Beirut (AUB) and a co-Director of the Beirut Urban Lab. His scholarly work explores governmental visual identities, information design, and mapping as a method of researching, representing, and analyzing socio-spatial phenomena. Among his mapping projects are Beirut, A city of Security, Practicing the Public: Beirut’s Open Spaces, and the ongoing mapping of Beirut’s built environment.
Gharbieh’s designs have been exhibited and published in numerous local and international venues. Gharbieh holds a Bachelor of Graphic Design from AUB and an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Bianca Antunes (FICA)
Bianca Antunes is the general coordinator at FICA Fund. She coordinated FICA’s exhibition at Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019) and co-organized FICA’s publication. She holds an MSc in urban development and international cooperation from TU Darmstadt and UIC Barcelona, where she studied residents’ perception of gentrification and anti-gentrification initiatives.
She has a background in journalism and was editor-in-chief of the Architecture and Urbanism (AU) Magazine in Brazil from 2009-2016. She is also co-founder of the Casacadabra project that aims to transmit social and technical concepts of urbanism and architecture to children and young people, through workshops and publications.
Bruno Marot
Bruno Marot is a city planner and an urban policy consultant. He holds a PhD from McGill University and two masters degrees from Sciences Po – Paris and the Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris where he is also a guest lecturer. His expertise and practice cover the financing and governance of urban development, property and affordable housing production across the Global South and North through collaborations with governments, international organizations and communities at the local and national level. His doctoral dissertation (“Developing Beirut (1990-2016): The political economy of ‘pegged urbanization’” (2018)) specifically unpacked the financialization of land and real estate in post-war Beirut and the role of property-led development in Lebanon’s financial and economic (in)stability.
Bruno occasionally contributes to Lebanon-based publications such as Le Commerce du Levant, Executive Magazine, L’Orient Le Jour and Revue fiscale libanaise. He is also an associate researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Beirut and a member of Atelier d’Initiatives Urbaines in Paris.
Cécile Diguet (Paris Region Institute)
Cécile Diguet is an urban planner, trained at Sciences-Po Paris and at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. After 6 years at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR) and 4 years as a Paris Region Institute in 2015. She works on the citizen re-appropriation of the urban fabric, in particular through the emergence of third places, urban commons and the practices of temporary and prefigurative urbanism. She also works on the decentralization of digital technical networks, and the interweaving of energy, digital and spatial issues, in order to think of sober contributive territories.
She contributed to the book “L’hypothèse collaborative, Conversation avec les collectifs d’architectes français”, produced an extensive study on temporary urbanisme at the Institute, and recently published a report on “The spatial and energy impact of data centres on territories”, as part of a research project with the Architecture School of East Paris. She became the Director of urban design and planning at Paris Region Institute on January 2020.
Cesare Di Feliciantonio (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Cesare Di Feliciantonio holds a double Ph.D. in Geography from Sapienza-University of Rome and KU Leuven. He is a lecturer in Human Geography (Manchester Metropolitan University) and is currently the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (host by the University of Leicester). In 2017 he was awarded the Prize of the Global Network on Financial Geography (FINGEO) for the best Ph.D. thesis defended in 2016. In 2018 he was awarded the Gabriele Zanetto prize from the Association of Italian Geographers for best early career geographer.
He is a co-editor of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. His work has been published on, among others, Antipode; Cities; Environment & Planning C; European Urban and Regional Studies; Geoforum; Housing Policy Debate; Housing, Theory & Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Urban Geography.
Dalia Wahdan (Nile University)
Dr. Dalia Wahdan is an associate professor of urban studies at the Architecture and Urban Design Program, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nile University, Egypt and former associate professor at School of International Studies at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME University), India.
She specializes in urbanism in India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia focusing on new town planning, vulnerability in unplanned settlements, urban subjectivities, insurgent citizenship and spatial inequities. Her publications include Planning Egypt’s New Settlements: The Politics of Spatial Inequities (Oxford University Press and Cairo Papers) and she is founder of Amaruna for Urban Studies, a private enterprise for research and policy analysis in Cairo.
Daniela Patti (Eutropian)
Daniela Patti is a co-founder of Eutropian. She is an Italian-British architect and urban planner, has studied in Rome, London, Porto and holds a Ph.D. in urbanism from the Technical University of Vienna. Her recent research and projects’ interest have been on the governance of peri-urban landscape, the revitalization of local food markets, economic models for community-based urban development and strategies to tackle urban poverty.
She regularly works with the URBACT, Urban innovative Actions, the International Urban Cooperation and Urban Agenda on Urban Poverty programs. She worked for the Rome Municipality in 2014-15, since 2012 she is board member of the Wonderland Platform for European Architecture and was a researcher at the Central European Institute of Technology in 2010-14.
Francisco Sabatini (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Universidad del Bío-Bío & Catholic University of Chile)
Francisco Sabatini is a sociologist and urban planner, professor in Chile at the Universidad del Bío-Bío and the Catholic University of Chile. His subjects of study are residential segregation, gentrification and land markets, and local environmental conflicts. Sabatini was an advisor to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning of the Chilean government after the return to democracy in 1990, as well as a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Environment.
He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of California at Los Angeles, and a Sociology degree and Master in Urban and Regional Planning from the Catholic University of Chile. He has published extensively in books and in specialized magazines, and has taught in several countries, mainly in Latin America. Sabatini is a longtime collaborator of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy as a course developer, teacher, and program researcher in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Fredrik Gertten (WG Film)
Fredrik Gertten, Director is an award-winning director and journalist based in Malmö, Sweden, and owner and manager of the production company WG Film which he founded in 1994. Previously he worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for radio, TV and press in Africa, Latin America, Asia and around Europe. Today he combines filmmaking with a role as a creative producer at WG Film.
Recent films include BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!*, world premiere Sundance 2012, BIKES VS CARS, world premiere SXSW 2015 and BECOMING ZLATAN, world premiere IDFA 2016. His films have met audiences in 100 countries, including leading festivals. In Sweden the sale of FairTrade bananas went from 5 to 50 per cent of the sales after the release of the BANANAS!* films. In October 2017 he was named Honorary Doctor at Malmö University’s Faculty of Culture and Society, for his work as a documentary filmmaker.
Guillaume Boudisseau (RAMCO)
Guillaume has been living in Lebanon since 1994, when he came to focus his scientific research as part of his studies on the Urban Geography of Beirut. Between 1995 and 1996, Guillaume worked as the assistant to the Director of CERMOC in Beirut (Centre d’Etude et de Recherche du Moyen Orient Contemporain) as part of the research division of the French Embassy linked to the French Foreign Ministry. In 2001, Guillaume obtained his PhD in urban geography from the University of Tours, France.
Guillaume’s thesis focused on the urban evolution of Hamra, explaining how the urban landscape of Hamra changed over the last 50 years and the reasons behind this evolution. Between 2003 and 2005, he worked as independent consultant specialized in undertaking feasibility and market research studies covering the residential, office, and retail sectors in Beirut. Guillaume joined RAMCO as Director of Research and Consultancy in 2005. In parallel, he is Professor of Urbanism and Beirut Retail Geography at ALBA University since 1998 and has been responsible since 2002 for the yearly publication of the real estate report in ‘Le Commerce du Levant’ magazine.
Hiba Bou Akar (Columbia University)
Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her recent book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (2018), examines how Beirut’s post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. Her first co-edited book, Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines (2011), incorporated ethnographic and archival research with art installations, architecture, graphic design, and photography to explore Beirut’s segregated geographies. She is currently leading the Post-Conflict Cities Lab at Columbia University.
Bou Akar received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from AUB and a Master in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT.
Hisham Ashkar (Lebanese University)
Hisham Ashkar is a doctor of economics and social sciences (Dr. rer. pol.), urban planner, architect, cartographer, photographer, and investigative journalist. He is also an occasional lecturer at the Lebanese University, Department of Urban Planning. His research centers on the relations between politico-economic systems and the production of urban space, with a focus on gentrification processes. Personal website: hishamashkar.org. Twitter: @hisham_ashkar.
Hyun Bang Shin (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He also co-directs the MSc programme in Urbanisation and Development. Hyun’s research centers on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of urbanization with particular attention to the themes of speculative urbanization, displacement, gentrification; housing; urban social movements, mega-events; mega-projects cities in Asian countries such as China, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore.
His most recent project on circulating urbanism and (Asian) capital has also brought him to work on Quito, Manila, Iskandar Malaysia, Kuwait City, and London. His recent books include Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015); Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016); Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Hyun is a board member (trustee) of the Urban Studies Foundation and sits on the editorial board of several journals that include Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Urban Geography; CITY; Radical Housing Journal; Space and Environment [in Korea].
Jeremy Nemeth (University of Colorado Denver)
Jeremy Németh is an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Director of the Ph.D. program in Geography, Planning, and Design at the University of Colorado Denver. His research looks at how planners, designers, and city dwellers can help create more socially and environmentally just places, and he is particularly interested in how the built environment shapes social equity. His recent work examines urban vacancy, disaster justice, transportation equity, green gentrification, and the politics of public space.
He is currently a Fulbright Specialist and in 2015-16 was a Fulbright Scholar at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre and a Visiting Professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers University, an MSc in Development and Planning from the Development Planning Unit at University College London, and an AB in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.
Kareem Rabie (American University)
Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, is forthcoming next year from Duke University Press. He trained in anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Prior to joining the faculty at AU, he was Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of Chicago.
In 2014-15 Kareem was based at the University of Oxford as Senior Researcher and Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society; and Research Associate at the Oxford Programme on the Future of Cities. While at Oxford, he began research on circulation and the new economic geographies of Palestine/China trade.
Koenraad Bogaert (Ghent University)
Koenraad Bogaert is Assistant Professor at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies and a member of the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) at Ghent University. His research is centered around the broader question of political change in the Arab World, more specifically Morocco, in relation to globalization, neoliberal urbanization, capitalist uneven development, and social protest.
His recent book, Globalized Authoritarianism. Megaprojects, Slums and Class relations in Urban Morocco, was published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Liza Rose Cirolia (African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town)
Dr. Liza Rose Cirolia. Liza is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Her key research areas include heterogenous urban infrastructure configurations, housing and real estate, and sub-national finance. Across these domains, she is particularly interested in understanding how seemingly technical systems reflect particular political assumptions and aspirations.
Her recent work is focused on the interface between finance, materiality, and governance. In this work, she aims to move between critique and proposition, experimenting with innovations in urban service delivery in African cities.
Liza Weinstein (Northeastern University)
Liza Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston. An expert on the politics of housing and urban development in India, she is the author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and is currently completing a comparative study of evictions and anti-eviction activism across urban India.
Her work has been published in Politics and Society, City and Community, and International Sociology, and numerous edited collections. She is also the editor of the Interventions section of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is a member of the Displacement Research and Action Network.
Maria Arquero de Alarcon (University of Michigan)
María Arquero de Alarcón is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning and Director of the Master of Urban Design at the University of Michigan Taubman College. Her work examines uneven and contested urbanization patterns and reveals the disparate urban imaginaries mediating the present and projecting alternative futures. Through the combination of grant-funded research initiatives, urban design experimentation, and site-specific interventions, her collaborative design practice MAde Studio advances socio-environmental and cultural sustainable values and integrates the knowledge co-generated with local collaborators and residents.
Her work is part of the edited volumes The Third Coast Atlas and Mapping Detroit; the journals Applied Geography, Sustainability, Michigan Journal of Sustainability, Architect Magazine’s “Next Progressives,” PLOT, Green and Building Design. The work she will be presenting in the 2020 City Debates at AUB is sponsored by the UM Michigan Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis and exhibited in the 2019 Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism.
Marieke Krijnen (Academic Editor)
Marieke Krijnen is a full-time editor specializing in copyediting academic manuscripts. She obtained an MA from the American University of Beirut in 2010 and a PhD in Political Science in 2016 from Ghent University, Belgium. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Orient-Institut Beirut in 2016–2017. Her thesis looked at the urban transformation of Beirut following the 2008 financial crisis and focused on the role of real estate developers and the banking sector herein.
Marieke published several articles on gentrification and the rent gap in Beirut. She has a strong background in urban studies, geography, and the political economy of the Middle East. She is currently enrolled in the Professional Editing Standards Certificate program at Queen’s University, Canada and is a member of the Society for Proofreaders and Editors (SfEP) and SENSE, the Society for English-language professionals in The Netherlands.
Martin J. Murray (University of Michigan)
Martin Murray is a tenured full professor of the Taubman College urban planning faculty. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Afro-American and African Studies, University of Michigan. He began his academic career as sociologist with a strong foundation in urban geography. His current research engages the fields of urban studies and planning, global urbanism, cultural geography, distressed urbanism, development, historical sociology, and African studies.
He has published a trilogy of books on space and power in Johannesburg. His book, entitled The Urbanism of Exception the Dynamics of Global City Building in the Twenty First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) focuses on zones, spaces of exception, and boundary-making in the understanding of global urbanism at the start of the 21st century.
Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield)
Michele is an urban ethnographer and activist interested in issues of marginality, diversity, and radical politics. His most recent writing has focused on homelessness, racialised displacement and underground life in Bucharest, Romania, where he also directed a collaborative documentary around forced evictions and housing resistance (www.ainceputploaia.com).
Michele is member of the Common Front for the Right to Housing (FCDL), and corecipient of two Antipode Awards (‘Scholar-Activist’ in 2018, with FCDL; ‘International Workshop’ in 2019, with RHJ). He is also one of the founders and Editors of the open-source Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an Editor of City, and Corresponding Editor for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), where he is commencing work on a 5-year European Research Council funded program on ‘Radical Housing’. You can get in touch @michelelancione
Mona Fawaz (AUB)
Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning and the Coordinator of the graduate programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design at the American University of Beirut. She is also the co-director of the Beirut Urban Lab, a recently established research center that engages policymakers, activists, and researchers in Lebanon and the region on questions of urban inclusion and post-conflict recovery. Fawaz also leads the urban track at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB (the Social Justice and the City program) and is a fellow affiliated to the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University during the 2014/15 academic year.
Mona’s scholarly interests stem from the imperative of making cities more inclusive, particularly from the perspective of enabling low-income dwellers to take part in shaping their cities. Her work spans across urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory and pedagogy. She is the author of over 40 scholarly articles, book sections, and reports in Arabic, French and English and has edited several collections of essays on these issues.
Raquel Rolnik (University of Sao Paulo)
Raquel Rolnik is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of São Paulo. Architect and urban planner, with over 35 years of scholarship, activism and practical experience in planning, urban land policy and housing issues, in her career, she has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of the city of São Paulo (1989-1992) and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities (2003-2007) as well as NGO and consultancy at national and international levels.
From 2008 to 2014 Raquel Rolnik was UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. She is author of several books and articles on financialization of housing and urban policies, including “Urban warfare: housing in the age of finance” by VERSO.
Zeina El- Helou (Independent Researcher and Political Activist)
Zeina El Helou is the founder and lead researcher of Ra’i for Research and Development, a private research company established in Beirut in 2015. Prior to that, Zeina worked in several positions including the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (2006-2010). She is the author of a large number of reports and research papers tackling issues of radicalization in Lebanon, independence of elections, and others. She is currently associated with LCPS as a Senior Researcher.
Zeina has served as the elected Secretary General of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections for a two-year term (March 2016 – March 2018) and as the Lebanese representative on the Radicalization Advisory Group of the Third Way Institute, Jordan in 2010. Zeina holds a Masters degree in Journalism from Université Assas – Paris II in conjunction with the Lebanese University. She also holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from Saint-Joseph University.
Discussants
Abir Saksouk Sasso (Public Works)
Abir is an architect, researcher, and urban planner. Her primary focus includes justice in planning, social production of shared space, and right to the city of socially and legally marginalised communities. She is active in developing forms of organizing, whether at the level of neighborhoods, syndicates, associations, or regions. Abir is a founding member of Dictaphone Group (2009) and Public Works Studio (2012).
Carol Mansour (Forward Film Production)
Carol Mansour is an independent documentary film maker. She founded Forward Film Production in 2000 in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work focuses on human right issues and social justice, covering subjects such as migrant domestic workers, refugees, environmental issues, mental health, prostitution and human trafficking, the rights of the disabled, war and memory, right to health, and child labor.
With over 20 years in documentary production, Mansour has covered the world from Sri Lanka to Lebanon to Uzbekistan. She has achieved international recognition and honor for her films, with over thirty film festival screenings and official selections worldwide.
Elisabetta Pietrostefani (UCL)
Elisabetta holds a PhD in Urban Economics and Planning Policy from the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on evaluating the effects of urban policies including density and compact urban form, affordable housing and conservation policies. Her most recent work focuses on the effects of urban change on quality of life as well as urban well-being and inequalities.
Her work adopts different analytic tools including comparative legal urbanism, meta-analytic research, and quantitative empirical models to test theoretical predictions. Elisabetta is currently a Research Associate at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity – RELIEF Centre. She is working with the Prosperity team towards the creation of a Prosperity Index for various locations in Lebanon.
Howayda Al-Harithy (AUB)
Howayda Al-Harithy is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Department of Architecture and Design and co-director of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her research focuses on urban heritage with a special emphasis on the theoretical debate on heritage construction and consumption related to identity building and post-war reconstruction in the Arab world.
Her current research conceptualizes urban recovery in relation to processes of historical editing, urban trauma, and protracted displacement. She is widely published with over 50 articles, book chapters, and reports in leading journals and refereed books. She is the editor of and contributor to Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War (Routledge, 2010), Post-war Recovery of Cultural Heritage Sites: Aleppo Taht al Qalaa (American University of Beirut, 2019, with Jala Makhzoumi), and Urban Recovery at the Intersection of Displacement and Reconstruction (Routledge, forthcoming).
Irène Salenson (Agence Française de Développement)
Irène Salenson is research officer on Urban Transitions at Economic and Research at the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement) in Paris, currently supervising several research projects in Lebanon and Middle East as well as research projects on land-based urban commons. Her fields of interest are: urban planning, housing, land issues, informal settlements, waste management.
Irène is the author of Jérusalem, Bâtir deux villes en une (2014), a book that explores urban policies and strategies in Jerusalem as well numerous research policy papers and academic pieces exploring challenges to the management of urban commons, precarious, neighborhoods among which “Plus de Securité Foncière Grace aux Communs” Metropolitiaue (2018), “Les Villes Africaines Vont-elles Exploser” The Conversation (2019). Irène holds has a PhD in Geography and Urban Planning from La Sorbonne University, Paris (2007).
Mona Harb (AUB)
Mona Harb is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics, and co-director of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013, with L. Deeb,), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (LCPS, 2015, with S.Atallah), and co-editor of Refugees as City-Makers (AUB, 2018, with M.Fawaz, A.Gharbieh and D.Salamé), in addition to numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other publications.
Her ongoing research investigates the public domain and vacancies, local governance and displacement, as well as urban activism and oppositional politics. She serves on the editorial boards of MELG, IJMES, IJURR, and Environment and Planning C, and is a trustee of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. She is the founder and co-editor of the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine.
Nasser Yassin (AUB)
Nasser Yassin is the Interim Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, and Associate Professor of policy and planning at the Health Management and Policy Department at the AUB. He co-chairs the AUB4Refugees Initiative that brings together and builds synergy among faculty and departments in AUB responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. He researches and advises on policy and social innovation especially in areas of health, youth and refugee policies and programs.
His work looks at how civil society actors, community groups and informal networks can influence policies as well as development and humanitarian programs. He is currently leading a research project on understanding the informal adaptive mechanisms among refugees and their host communities in the Middle East. He is author of more than 30 internationally published articles and reports.
Sara Mourad (AUB)
Sara Mourad is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, where she also co-directs the Women & Gender Studies Program. She received her PhD in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Political Science at AUB. Sara’s work is at the intersection of cultural studies, feminist theory, and Middle East Studies. Her book in process, on women’s narratives in postwar Lebanese public culture, examines novels, films, television series, and activist publications to consider how womanhood has been constituted as an identity and how female narrative shaped the formation of feminism as a cultural field in contemporary Lebanon.
Sara is also working on a book of essays about motherhood and the question of time in feminism. In 2018, she was awarded a fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Her research and writing on media and gender politics in the Arab world is published in the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Communication Inquiry, Jadaliyya, Legal Agenda, and Daraj.
Ziad Abu-Rish (Ohio University)
Ziad Abu-Rish is an assistant professor at Ohio University, where he also directs the Middle East and North Africa Studies certificate program. He specializes in the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and his research interests focus on the political economy and cultural constructions of state formation in the Arab Middle East.
He is particularly interested in the discursive and material production of a national economy as a sphere of action as well as a site of mundane and institutional struggle. Such a research agenda involves three lines of inquiry: the social history of shifting patterns of alliances and conflicts; the institutional history of the norms, repertoires, legacies, and regulations that shape a given political economy; and the cultural history of the reproduction of “the state” through specific representational practices.