Announcements

 

  • call for papers #14

    2019-05-28

    call for papers #14

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics and Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its fourteenth issue, which will be entitled Gender. Facing recent events and upheavals in the Arab World, this issue of META intends to conceptualize the category of gender in the context of changing social, political, and ideological configurations. Special attention will be given the collective protests that took over the Arab world in 2010 and 2011 and the second wave in Sudan and Algeria in 2019, when women and men claimed freedom and dignity side by side. The visibility of women in public spaces rekindles the ambiguous relation between feminism, patriarchy, and nationalism. It underscores the fluidity of borders that cuts across traditional concepts of bodies and voices and their respective spaces and opens political discourses for new diverse arrangements.

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  • call for papers #13

    2018-11-07

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its thirteenth issue, which will be entitled Contacts. Within this volume we suggest conceptualizing contacts in the form of cross-cultural exchange and its instruments in the context of different disciplines. By adopting a wide understanding of “contacts” we intend to elaborate new approaches and scopes at the intersections of several disciplines. Contacts may be described from the point of view of the cultural, political, and social conditions in which they occur, as well as their consequences.

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  • A reflection on infrastructure of academia and the Close-Up section of the 10th issue

    2018-07-20

    We were imbued with the responsibility to choose, reject and edit the articles we received. In so doing, our work and academic practice is not just about infrastructure as an object of study. Rather, such editorial practices are part and parcel of an infrastructural foundation of academia that we all create, sustain and reproduce as academics. Publishing on material and social infrastructures in the MENA region is thus inherently related to the very social and professional networks in which we all work, write, publish and thrive.

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  • Anniversary Celebration: Middle East Studies, Digital Culture and Infrastructure

    2018-05-24

    META is celebrating its five-year anniversary this year. With the forthcoming issue #10 on Infrastructure META marks the occassion by a get-together with associates, members, sponsors, colleagues, readers and friends. In consideration of our past achievements and future challenges we would be delighted to welcome you at the CNMS in Marburg this summer!

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  • call for papers #12

    2018-01-16

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its twelfth issue, which will be entitled Urban Development. This issue intends to critically investigate and question processes of urban change and transformation from a wide range of (trans-)disciplinary, conceptual and theoretical, as well as methodological, approaches.

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  • call for papers #11

    2017-10-17

    The peer‐reviewed online journal Middle East – Topics & Arguments (META Journal) is calling for submissions for its issue on the topic of Trauma.

     

    The history of trauma—as a disorder of the railway, as shell shock, as a psychoanalytic concept and then post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in biomedical psychiatry—is entangled with war, technology, science, and suffering. Following the rise of feminist and peace movements in the United States and the lobbying of veterans from the Vietnam War, a renewed interest in trauma led the Diagnostic Statistical Manual III (DSM III, 1980) to agree on the existence of common forms of reaction to diverse traumatic events and include all symptoms under one category and diagnosis: PTSD. Since then, trauma has attracted new interest and dissemination in theory and in intervention, especially with the incorporation of psychological care and therapy in humanitarian interventions. Read more about call for papers #11

  • call for papers #10

    2017-03-30

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its tenth issue on the topic of “Infrastructure”.

     

    Infrastructure points to the ultimate conceptual debates of social science; it highlights the strong connections between material things, lives, and practice with immaterial and ideational aspects of human life. Furthermore, infrastructural matters like pipes, dams, walls, grids, cables, etc. reveal and, even more so, complicate the relationship between nature and humanity.  Infrastructure as the topic for the tenth issue of Middle East – Topics & Arguments (META) offers a variety of conceptual approaches from many disciplines, such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, media studies and economics (among others), as the topic connects the research on practices of everyday life with questions of planning, state politics and local and global neoliberal developments.

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  • call for papers #9

    2016-11-07

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its ninth issue, which will be entitled Youth.

     

    The uprisings of 2011 challenged many predominant concepts of ‘youth’ in the MENA region. Before, young people were often merely discussed as a ‘youth bulge’ – a demographic, quantitative problem, even a potential terrorist threat. In other stereotypical representations, youths and young adults hardly appeared as political subjects, but rather as objects of policies that had to change: unemployed and socially excluded, passive victims of a failed social pact negotiated between former generations and authoritarian regimes. Movements that contradicted both stereotypes, like the Moroccan and Tunisian unemployed graduates, who had been protesting ‘apolitically’, negotiating their employment with authoritarian regimes for over a decade, hardly received any attention.

     

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  • call for papers #8

    2016-05-09

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its eighth issue, which will be entitled Iconography.

    When regarding the flourishing array of murals in post-revolutionary Cairo, one is as impressed by the broad variety of pictures and words employed in these famous graffiti as by the range of performative responses these newly created “icons” of the revolution draw from the audience of contemporary Egypt and beyond. While here as in other depictions of “martyrs”, social actors play out larger political debates concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence, the pictures created in turn force their audience to some form of engagement, a process aptly described as an “entanglement” by A. Gell.[1] They are in this aspect surprisingly parallel to the canon of royal pastimes known as the Princely Cycle in the study of Medieval Islamic material culture, depicting rulers in recurring scenes of hunting, feasting and music to an audience in all likelihood striving to emulate these princely pastimes in performances of their own.


    [1] Art and Agency, A. Gell, Oxford 1998.

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  • call for papers: off topic section

    2016-04-11

    The META Off Topic section aims to publish articles pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to fields of relevance to the greater Middle East and North Africa. “Off Topic” articles do not relate to the issue’s main topic and may be on any matter that fits into the journal’s general scope. We seek to cover a broad range of disciplines – among them history, literature, linguistics, media studies, political science, social and cultural anthropology, Islamic Studies, Semitic Studies as well as Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish or Iranian Studies. Submissions should provide original analyses of up-to-date issues, or discussion of recent research results.

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  • call for papers #7

    2015-11-24

    The peer-reviewed online journal “Middle East – Topics & Arguments” (META) is calling for submissions for its seventh issue, which will be entitled Culture.

    The META issue “Culture” aims to critically engage with the various, often contradictory concepts of culture as used in the field of Middle Eastern Studies. The corpora of literature appropriated by the different disciplines relevant for the scope of META treat the issue in a variety of different ways, sometimes using the word "culture" as describing a universal and non-negotiable category, and often without expounding the problem of essentialisms emanating from its inherent normative quality, i.e. perceiving a culture as something either inherently bad or good, something to be desired, or something to be feared.

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  • call for reviews

    2015-09-30
    The META review section aims to publish reviews of scholarly publications, academic events and audiovisual productions about the Middle East and North Africa as well as from the region itself; therefore we also welcome reviews on work that has been published in other languages than English, German, or French.. Read more about call for reviews