Call for Papers

Communities across the Middle East and its diasporas, as well as in comparable global contexts, continue to confront the legacies of colonialism, displacement, mass violence, and cultural erasure. In many of these settings, the work of preserving memory, sustaining cultural practices, and asserting presence becomes a powerful form of creative resistance. This conference invites proposals that examine how identity, memory, indigeneity, and cultural production are reclaimed, negotiated, and transformed under conditions of historical and ongoing violence.

While the conference is grounded in the historical and geographical Middle East, it also engages the Global Middle East as an analytical framework that highlights diasporic, transnational, and relational formations of identity, culture, and power. We welcome contributions that move beyond state-centered or policy-driven analyses to foreground lived experience, community-based knowledge, and cultural production as critical lenses for understanding displacement, belonging, justice, and identity formation.

Bringing together scholars, artists, practitioners, students, and community partners, the conference seeks to foster interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities, social sciences, arts, law, education, public humanities, and community-engaged scholarship. We particularly encourage work that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and creative practices of communities who continue to resist erasure, preserve cultural heritage, and imagine more just and equitable futures.

Themes and Topics

We invite proposals that engage, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Creative Resistance and Cultural Production

Artistic, literary, material, and cultural practices as forms of resistance to colonialism, occupation, systemic violence, and cultural erasure.

Material Culture and the Reclamation of Identity

Dress, textiles, objects, architecture, archives, heritage, and other forms of material culture as sites of memory, indigeneity, belonging, and resistance.

Literature, Art, Media, and Performance

Visual arts, literature, film, music, theatre, performance, and digital media as practices of remembering, narrating, witnessing, and imagining alternative futures.

Spatial, Bodily, and Everyday Practices of Memory

The role of place, landscape, the body, ritual, and everyday practices in sustaining memory, identity, and cultural continuity.

Affect, Emotion, and Collective Memory

Emotion, empathy, mourning, hope, and collective feeling as forces that shape experiences of trauma, solidarity, resistance, and belonging.

Intergenerational Memory, Trauma, and Healing

Storytelling, oral history, education, family histories, and community-based practices that transmit memory, address historical trauma, and contribute to healing and identity reconstruction.

Diaspora, Migration, and Transnational Identities

The formation and transformation of identities across borders, diasporic networks, refugee experiences, mobility, and transnational communities.

Narrative, Archives, and Knowledge Production

Oral histories, archives, museums, digital humanities, public humanities, community-based research, and other forms of knowledge production that challenge dominant narratives and expand historical understanding.

AI, Digital Technologies, Empire, and Resistance

Artificial intelligence, algorithms, digital platforms, surveillance technologies, and emerging media as sites of power, knowledge production, representation, cultural preservation, and resistance. We welcome work examining how these technologies reproduce or challenge colonial and imperial structures; shape representations of Middle Eastern, Indigenous, displaced, and diasporic communities; transform archives, memory, and cultural heritage; and create new possibilities and ethical challenges for documenting violence, resisting erasure, and reclaiming identity.

Law, Human Rights, and Justice

International law, human rights, transitional justice, legal advocacy, and other approaches to addressing historical and ongoing violence.

Presentation Formats

We welcome proposals for:

  • Individual papers
  • Organized panels
  • Roundtables
  • Artistic and performance-based presentations
  • Community-engaged and public scholarship projects

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words accompanied by a brief biography of 100–150 words. Panel proposals should include a panel description together with individual abstracts for each participant.

Submission Portal: Submit Your Proposal

Submission Opens: June 30, 2026
Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2027
Notification of Acceptance: March 1–15, 2027
Conference Dates: October 15–17, 2027

Questions may be directed to eothman@amwrri.org.