Where scholarship, community knowledge, and creative practice converge

This conference brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, students, community leaders, and community partners to explore how identity, memory, cultural production, and diverse forms of knowledge production are reclaimed and transformed in contexts shaped by colonialism, displacement, occupation, war, migration, and historical violence.

Communities across the Middle East and its diasporas, as well as in comparable global contexts, continue to confront the legacies of colonial domination, forced displacement, and cultural erasure. In many of these settings, the everyday work of preserving memory, sustaining cultural practices, and asserting belonging constitutes a powerful form of creative resistance. Together, participants will explore the diverse ways individuals and communities respond to these conditions through scholarship, artistic expression, material culture, storytelling, performance, public engagement, and community-based knowledge.

Grounded in the historical and geographical Middle East while engaging the Global Middle East as an analytical framework, the conference encourages interdisciplinary conversations that move across national boundaries and connect local experiences with broader transnational, diasporic, and comparative perspectives. We welcome contributions that examine identity, indigeneity, memory, justice, cultural heritage, migration, religion, and everyday practices of resilience through historical, social, political, legal, artistic, literary, and community-centered approaches.

We invite proposals from scholars, artists, practitioners, students, and community partners whose work engages questions of identity, memory, indigeneity, cultural production, creative resistance, and social justice. Please visit the Call for Papers page for conference themes, presentation formats, submission guidelines, and important dates, or the About This Conference page to learn more about the conference's intellectual vision and guiding principles.

Conference Leadership

Conference Chair
Professor Enaya Othman

Conference Committee
Professor Richard Taylor
Associate Professor Noelle Brigden
Professor Irfan Omar
Associate Professor Timothy McMahon