Middle East Studies

Death and Afterlives in the Middle East | Workshop

event poster

Friday, September 27, 2019

8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute
111 Thayer St.

Registration is at capacity. Seats may open up to those on the waitlist as space permits.

Aslı Zengin, Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Department of Anthropology, and the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University are organizing a one-day workshop titled “Death and Afterlives in the Middle East,” to be held on Friday, September 27, 2019.

The theme for the conference brings together academics from around the world to consider the social, political, symbolic and material life of death. Participants will discuss how death and its afterlives help us develop new tropes to think about belonging, migration, mobility, regimes of security, war on terror, violence, intimacy, and care.

Confirmed participants include Eirini Avramopoulou, Osman Balkan, Frances Hasso, Minoo Moallem, Ugur Pece, Graham Auman Pitts, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Nukhet Varlik.

Workshops, Conferences, Seminars

Program

Friday, September 27, 2019
8:30  –  9:00 a.m. 
Registration

9:00 – 9:30 a.m. 
Welcome and Introduction

Aslı Zengin, Brown University, "Social and Political Life of Death in the Middle East"

9:30 a.m. – 11:30 p.m.
Posthumous Labor: Mortal Mobilities, Geographies of Injury and Caring for the Dead

Uğur Z. Peçe, Lehigh University, “Through a Lens Deadly:  Displacement and Depiction of Violence in the Ottoman Empire, 1895-1912”
Eirini Avramopoulou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece "Living Archives of Death: Representational Violence and the Aporia of Freedom"
Osman Balkan, Swarthmore College "The Political Afterlives of Dead Migrants"

11:30 – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch for Participants and Hosts

1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Demographics of Demise: Governing Social Reproduction, Political Anxieties and Mortality  

Nükhet Varlık, Rutgers University, Newark "New Methods for Governing Death in Early Modern Istanbul"
Graham Auman Pitts, Georgetown University "The Afterlife of an Intersectional Famine: Gender, Nature, and Death in World War I Mount Lebanon"
Frances Hasso, Duke University "Racial Anxieties, Eugenics, and the Demographics of Life and Death in Colonial Palestine"

3:30 –  5:30 p.m.
Militarized Death: A Critical Inquiry into Memory, War on Terror and Settler Colonialism

Minoo Moallem, University of Caifornia, Berkeley "Martyrdom, National Memory and Iran-Iraq War Movies"
Sima Shakshari, University of Minnesota, "Dying on YouTube and Dying at YouTube: Nassim Aghdam, Neda Agha Soltan, and Loaned Life"
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Necropenology: Conquering New Bodies, Psyches, and Territories in East Jerusalem"

5:45 – 6:30 p.m.
Discussion 

Moderator: Shahzad Bashir, Brown University

7:30 – 9:00 p.m.
Official Dinner for Participants and Hosts