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Category: Conversations

“The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she specializes in Middle East politics, social movements, and narrative approaches to understanding conflict and displacement. She has been EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien during the summers of the years 2016-2018 and 2021-2022. She is the author of “The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora” (Liveright Books, 2024)

That Was Tomorrow: A Conversation About Arab Imaginaries in Berlin

Syrian writer Rasha Abbas and Palestinian artist Muhammad Jabali, in conversation with Diana Abbani, discuss the evolving dynamics and narratives shaping Berlin, a city once envisioned as an Arab cultural hub. By exploring how Berlin’s cultural landscape has been influenced by migration, identity politics, and recent political changes, emphazizing the need for both imagination and realistic approaches to create more livable cities.

Development at Work: Postcolonial Imaginaries, Global Capitalism, and Everyday Life at a Factory in Tunisia – A Conversation with André Weißenfels

André Weißenfels is a researcher focusing on the political economy of West Asia and North Africa as well as community decision-making processes, and “the social.” He has worked as a research associate at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin and was a PhD fellow at the Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies. He is the author of “Development at Work: Postcolonial Imaginaries, Global Capitalism, and Everyday Life at a Factory in Tunisia”. A conversation with Diana Abbani.

Arab Engagement at the World Festival of Youth and Students in the USSR in 1957 – A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop is Associate Professor of History at Texas State University-San Marcos. Her research interests include the modern Arab world, media, and material history. In this conversation, Dianna Abbani discusses the article “Arabs at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students: UGEMA in the USSR, 1957” with her.

The Rule of Law Restoration in Poland – Legal and Political Challenges

In this conversation with RevDem editor and a re:constitution fellow Kasia Krzyżanowska, Krzysztof Izdebski (Batory Foundation) and Bartosz Pilitowski (Court Watch Poland) discuss all the current challenges the Polish government is facing with the legal legacy left by the Law and Justice party. How to restore trust in the judicial institutions? How to deal with the irregularly established Constitutional Tribunal and the National Council of the Judiciary? What should be the role of the judges in designing the judicial system?

Words and their Worlds: A Conversation with Dilip M. Menon

In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. A conversation with Mahmoud Al-Zayed.

The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language

By Maryam Fatima, Alexander Jabbari and Mehtap Ozdemir. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the afterlives of the Persianate beyond the nineteenth century, this Philological Encounters’ special issue addresses questions of literary modernity in the Persianate world and takes the question of form to the fore, advancing a comparative methodology attuned to formalism and historicism.

An Unruly Persianate

By Purnima Dhavan. The Persianate world has long been defined as a distinct historical formation in the premodern era with a beginning and an end. More recently, scholars have rightly started to question this premature assumption of its demise. The special issue of Philological Encounters extends and complicates the argument about the long life of the Persianate. One hesitates to call it an afterlife, as it seems the “death” of the Persianate never happened.