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Call for Abstracts: The Urban and Local Dimensions of Political Violence in Syria and the Middle East workshop

06/02/2023

October 27 - 29, 2023

    Istanbul - Turkey

Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2023


 

Urban spaces play a critical role in (re)shaping conflict dynamics in the Global South, with collective action often originating and intensifying into violence within cities. Uprisings and insurrections tend to thrive in peripheral urban parameters, and long-lasting warfare dramatically transforms both the physical and social aspects of the built environment in the Middle East. The urban as a lens informs the analysis of sociology variables such as race and ethnicity/sect, class, age, gender, not to mention morality/religion. Although urban and local politics of the region is being increasingly featured in related scholarship, there is a persisting need to probe the patterns in which political violence are “urbanized”—as physical/material elements and/or as density/concentration of networks or local communities.

This call for papers seeks to centralize dense networks, as a research subject and approach, and the creative use/collection of datasets in urban and spatial analysis. Special attention is also given to the relational approach to local dynamics in the examination of political violence and contentious politics, as opposed to typical macro-themes of urban politics. For datasets, specifically in the case of codification, the spatial turn in Middle East-related scholarship is yet to integrate georeferenced projects in ways that allow for answering cross-cutting theoretical questions.

As such, the Syria Urban Research Project (SUR Project), a group of Arab researchers working on related questions in Syria and the Middle East, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the American Political Science Association (APSA), and in collaboration with the Civilization Forum 2023of The Alliance of Civilizations Institute (MEDIT) at Ibn Haldun University (Istanbul) and the Beirut Urban Lab (BUL) at the American University of Beirut is organizing a three-day interdisciplinary—and dataset-focused—workshopthat aims to convene postgraduate students and young scholars employing georeferenced datasets in any country in the Middle East on the subject.

Applicants are expected to produce short pieces of research (around 2,500 words)based on such datasets (whether existing, or independently collected) in order to receive feedback from other participants and senior scholars. It is possible to participate with datasets that are still being elaborated, as long as there is a clear vision of their research application, since the workshop includes sessions on how to improve the codification/collection process. Abstracts should provide a brief mention of the kind of data to be used/developed and can address the subject from any discipline in the social sciences as well as urban studies and architecture.

The workshop will be hosted at MEDIT’s historical campus in Suleymaniye alongside their broader conference on mobilities and mobilization. Presenters will be able to attend and benefit from sessions in both events, as well as a half-day training module on mapping and visualization skills and methodological approaches to socio-spatial analysis, organized by BUL in line with the datasets development objective.

Interested graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scholars are invited to submit 300-400-word abstracts by July 1 using the application form. Applicants interested in conducting quantitative research without already having a dataset are welcome to contact the organizing committee ahead of the submission deadline, ideally by June 20, to discuss the possibility of accessing existing datasets on geocoded protest data, urban data (e.g. property, facilities, infrastructure), physical destruction, and more.

Few travel grants will be granted on a need basis.

Workshop timeline:

Abstracts Submission: 1 July

Accepted abstracts notification: 20 July

Full papers \ extended abstracts submission: 15 October

The workshop in Istanbul: 27-29 October

To apply, please fill out this form.

For more information please visit: https://sur-project.com/workshop

For any inquiries, please contact: syriaurbanresearch@gmail.com

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