About This Conference

Communities across the Middle East and its diasporas, as well as in comparable global contexts, continue to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism, displacement, occupation, mass violence, and cultural erasure. In many of these settings, preserving memory, sustaining cultural practices, and asserting presence become powerful forms of resistance. This conference examines how identity, memory, indigeneity, and cultural production are reclaimed, negotiated, and transformed under conditions of historical and ongoing violence.

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 beyond state-centered or policy-driven analyses to foreground lived experience, cultural production, and community-based knowledge. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the conference seeks to illuminate the complex ways individuals and communities navigate displacement, belonging, resilience, and social transformation across diverse historical and contemporary contexts.

The conference is guided by the understanding that knowledge is produced across multiple sites, including academic research, oral histories, archives, museums, artistic practice, public humanities, community organizations, and the lived experiences of individuals and communities. Bringing these forms of knowledge into dialogue allows for richer and more inclusive understandings of identity, memory, justice, and social transformation. By recognizing multiple ways of knowing, the conference seeks to create space for conversations that are both intellectually rigorous and grounded in the experiences of the communities whose histories and futures are under discussion.

The conference recognizes that creative resistance extends far beyond moments of political protest. It encompasses the preservation and revitalization of language, dress, material culture, oral traditions, archives, artistic expression, education, religious and cultural practices, community organizing, legal advocacy, digital storytelling, and other everyday acts through which individuals and communities sustain memory, assert dignity, preserve cultural continuity, and imagine more just futures. By approaching creative resistance in this broader sense, the conference highlights the many ways communities respond to historical and ongoing violence while reshaping dominant narratives through cultural production, scholarship, and public engagement.

We welcome scholarship and creative work that engages historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, legal, political, artistic, educational, and community-based perspectives. The conference seeks to foster meaningful dialogue among scholars, artists, practitioners, students, and community partners while encouraging conversations that cross disciplinary, methodological, institutional, and geographic boundaries.

By bringing together academic scholarship with artistic practice, public humanities, and community-engaged research, the conference affirms that knowledge is produced in many forms and across many spaces. We seek to highlight work that not only documents histories of violence and displacement but also examines the diverse ways communities preserve cultural continuity, negotiate belonging, and imagine more just and equitable futures.

Conference Values

  • Interdisciplinary Dialogue: We foster conversations across the humanities, social sciences, arts, law, public health, and related fields to encourage new perspectives on complex historical and contemporary issues.
  • Multiple Forms of Knowledge Production: We recognize scholarly research, artistic practice, oral histories, archives, public humanities, and community-based knowledge as complementary ways of understanding the past and shaping the future.
  • Community Engagement: We value reciprocal partnerships that recognize communities as collaborators and knowledge producers whose lived experiences enrich scholarship and public discourse.
  • Global and Comparative Perspectives: We encourage conversations that connect the Middle East with its diasporas and with broader transnational and comparative contexts, highlighting shared experiences and diverse histories.
  • Intellectual Rigor and Public Relevance: We support scholarship and creative work that advances academic inquiry while contributing to broader public conversations about memory, identity, justice, equity, and social transformation.

Hosted by the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Studies Program at Marquette University in collaboration with the Arab and Muslim Women's Research and Resource Institute (AMWRRI), this conference reflects a shared commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, public engagement, cultural preservation, and collaborative research. We hope this gathering will provide an inclusive forum for exchanging ideas, building new partnerships, and advancing conversations that connect scholarship with communities, creative practice, and public life.

In addition to academic scholarship, the conference seeks to create meaningful dialogue with community leaders, organizers, advocates, artists, and practitioners whose work addresses issues such as Islamophobia, racism, settler colonialism, indigeneity, migration, displacement, equity, and social justice. We recognize that communities experiencing these realities are not merely subjects of research but also producers of knowledge, historical memory, and transformative practice. By bringing scholars and community practitioners into conversation, the conference aims to explore how research, public engagement, and grassroots initiatives inform one another, contribute to more inclusive and accountable narratives, and advance collaborative approaches to justice, equity, and social change.