SMMAC is back!
The stories we tell. Engaging archives otherwise – Contemporary Arab and Muslim Worlds Seminar Series – 2021-2022
We are really excited to present our forthcoming seminar series. Join us and a wonderful line up of speakers to discuss the stories we tell and ways of engaging archives otherwise.
This year' series is about the stories we tell. The stories we tell matter. It matters not only what they say about others and ourselves but also how we craft them. This seminar series engages scholars and artists of the Middle East working across disciplines and national boundaries for a set of crossed conversations on critical and creative archival practices. The current political moment and the ravages of empire across the region demand that we unlearn and rethink forms of knowing to foreground histories and struggles on the margins. we envisage this series as a way to collectively explore methods and approaches at the intersection of social science and art-based research that can nourish and transform historical and ethnographic storytelling. In doing so we consider what constitutes an archive and what are the challenges of producing, collecting and interpreting primary sources – from state collections, canonical texts and journals to family histories, folk songs, audiovisual material, urban sites and seeds.
We start this journey the 3rd of November 2021.
