FAS professorial-rank faculty members are invited to submit proposals for funding to organize a conference at AUB on topics in Anthropology, Economics, Education, Gender, Media Studies, Public Health, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, or other related fields. The grant may potentially be used to invite speakers and discussants within and outside the AUB community. Bobst-AUB has limited funding for this opportunity, and applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Eligibility: FAS professorial-rank faculty members. Priority will be given to junior faculty and first-time applicants.
Budget: Up to $3,000
Application materials: Apply online. Please upload in PDF: 1. Proposal (1-2 pages) including abstract (no more than 200 words), the anticipated budget for air travel (if applicable), accommodation (if applicable), honoraria, and a meal event with the speaker; and 2. Information on funding source, status, and coverage amount if additional funds have been received or sought from other sources.
Application deadline: October 1; March 15
Contact: [email protected]
2026-27
- Cartographies of Dissent: Art, Labour, Politics
Ghalya Saadawi, Department of Fine Arts and Art History (FAAH)
This is a proposal for a two-day symposium hosted and co-organized by the FAAH, co-hosted by the AUB galleries and with Dr. Ghalya Saadawi as the symposium lead. The symposium probes forms of dissent (boycott, strike, riot, blockade) in an age of late capitalism where circulation and logistical infrastructures underpin the broader economy.
Circulation as a mode of production (Charmaine Chua) and spatial fixes (David Harvey) came to characterize a new crisis in capitalism. From the view that valorization occupies multiple sites and arenas, an emphasis on logistics and circulation, surplus populations, and culture reemerged, maintaining the centrality of organizing: worker councils, strikes, riots, blockades, boycotts, became tactics and strategies of counter logistics. The question of the proletariat can be said to have returned through another door, even whilst the political and social question of revolution was postponed.
Since the age of so-called globalization, founded on the myths of smooth integrationist flows, we have seen the unevenness of these conduits of capitalist valorisation. We understand that deindustrialization (and neoliberalism) has meant not only a new economic order based on privatization, debt, precarious work, and managerialism, but also a new forms of proletarianization and thus new forms of dissent and organizing: direct logistical action such as blockades, calls for boycott and divestment, port strikes, at least 10 global uprisings, the 2014 block the boat for Gaza, the 2020 George Floyd riots, the 2008-10 anti-austerity and bank bailout blockades and strikes of the Occupy movement, the uprisings of Gezi and the Indignados and later the 2011 Arab spring, coming after the wave of social movements against the WTO and other trade agreements that contoured the periods of globalization and alterglobalisation in the 1990s-early 2000’s.
During Covid between 2020 and 2023, 16 million US workers unionized, labor struggle was on the rise say in October 2021 when a wave of strikes and unionization became referred to as STRIKETOBER; thousands of JFK8 Amazon warehouse workers unionized forming the ALU; etc.
The question of dissent in contemporary art and culture is an enduring one. It intensified with The Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, and later during the Whitney Biennial, as only two examples, when it was evidenced that William Kanders, board member of the museum, was a tear gas CEO (it was renamed the tear gas biennia). Historically, social art history and left art criticism are no strangers to these debates as they have been moved to understand labor in art, the value it creates, its objects as complex commodities, its flows as part of capital circulation, the infrastructure and reproduction that subtends art, as points of engagement.
Under the genocide in Palestine and even the rise of the far right in Europe and the United States, the debate around what art can or should do, whom does it serve, what is its labour politics, and what subtends the economy (“A laundromat of hegemonic values” Marina Vishmidt), have come to the fore again. Countless art establishments have silenced, censored and fired workers, artists, editors, curators engaged against Zionism, and against capital interests in defending genocide. Additionally, how does this relate to the Arab world and its artists and institutions and markets? The art and culture industry, contemporary art, has continued very much business-as-usual.
Since the genocide of the Gazans by Israel, and the ongoing war on Lebanon, it has been made very clear that cultural business-as-usual means involvement in the political-economic and ideological forces that make genocide possible. It has Dissent highlighted the contradictions of these systems.
For this symposium, there is a desire to read forms of labour, political and cultural dissent across several scales. It revisits these urgent conversations to consider the relation once more between art, aesthetics, political economy and organizing. Dissent is probed through both cultural and economic struggles. (For instance, in art, dissent is probed through the question of Palestine, the BDS movement and meanings of solidarity, histories of artist worker coalitions, the question of art, value and social reproduction, and beyond).
The current militarist and imperial conjuncture has social, political-economic and aesthetic dimensions and is clearly of urgency to our FAAH and FAS students across disciplines (sociology, art history, Middle East studies/American studies, critical humanities, etc.), and there is a need for these conversations by our students and our faculty.
- Critical AI and the Liberal Arts: A Symposium Proposal
Kirsten Scheid, Department of Sociology Anthropology and Media Studies
In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological change, the liberal arts remain more relevant than ever. While AI can synthesize information, generate content, and reduce labor costs, it cannot replace the depth of cultural understanding, ethical reflection, and historical perspective that human thought, as embodied in the liberal arts tradition, cultivate through cumulative educational and life experience. As we confront profound uncertainty about the future, the liberal arts offer a unique opportunity to reflect on questions generated from the human experience in ways that AI cannot: What constitutes a meaningful education? How do the liberal arts help us interpret new technological realities? What does it mean to demonstrate “humanity” in educational contexts? How can we imagine futures that are technologically sophisticated, culturally relevant, and socially just?
Today’s students are not only experimenting with AI but actively using these tools to generate writing, research questions, and find? argumentation. While such tools expand creative and intellectual horizons, they also raise urgent questions: How does one interpret knowledge without first accumulating it? Which forms of knowledge truly matter in a world where machines can “know” so much? How can AI function as a collaborator in knowledge production rather than a substitute? Students are eager for spaces to explore these dilemmas safely, not only as users of technology but as thinkers and producers of knowledge with agency.
What is now known as Critical AI emerges as such a site of knowledge. It fosters new interdisciplinary alliances, where data justice principles centered on antiracist, decolonial, and emancipatory political practices foster community-centered collaborations, vertical pedagogies, and public contact to foster the production of knowledge, research, teaching, and knowledge that interrogates the history and social impact of machine technologies, then and now. This symposium situates these concerns within the regional lens of the Arab and Mediterranean worlds, a region long defined by intellectual, cultural, and technological exchange.
2025-26
Contemporary Arabic Philosophy: Mapping The Field
Emma Gannage, Department of Philosophy
Major political and cultural transformations in the Arab world have prompted philosophers and other intellectuals to develop rich and diverse conceptual frameworks to make sense of these transformations, yet their work is absent from both regional and international academic philosophical research. The main purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers who recognize this gap in the field of philosophy and are interested in shedding light on important philosophical work in the contemporary Arab world.
One of the main themes that pervades much of the philosophical thinking in the Arab world concerns the legitimacy or lack thereof of the methods, conceptual frameworks, and general philosophical problems that were inherited from the western world. On the one hand, these methods and frameworks seemed to be reliable and unique intellectual tools that were carefully developed and refined over the course of generations of European intellectuals, precisely to understand the philosophical foundations of major social transformations. On the other hand, since these tools were the product of a particular history in a particular part of the world, it was unclear whether they could be adopted and used uncritically by Arabic philosophers to understand the new challenges facing them in their part of the world. Thus, the theme that we propose to explore in the conference is the tension between the universality intrinsic to philosophy and its particular applications and methodologies in the Arab world.
Ottoman Political Economies Workshop at the American University of Beirut (May 2026)
Varak Ketsamanian, Department of History and Archaeology
The Ottoman Empire, spanning six centuries and vast territories, developed intricate systems for organizing production, labor, and resources while shaping distinctive legal and social frameworks of political economy. Yet, despite growing scholarly interest in global history, capitalism, and the post-Ottoman Middle East, the empire’s role in the making of global capitalism—and the ways Ottoman practices of law, labor, property, and exchange might enrich our conceptual vocabulary—remain insufficiently explored.
Founded in 2020, the Ottoman Political Economies (OPE) network brings together early-career scholars to examine these questions through sustained, interdisciplinary collaboration. Since its inception, OPE has organized fourteen virtual and four in-person workshops with over sixty participants, establishing itself as a global forum for innovative research in Ottoman economic and social history.
This upcoming workshop at the American University of Beirut marks a new stage in the network’s development, building on earlier meetings at NYU, Cambridge, Northumbria and Istanbul. It has two primary aims: to consolidate a community of junior scholars centering material and economic questions in Ottoman studies, and to introduce these approaches to a wider academic audience in Beirut, a historic hub of Ottoman commerce and finance. Through pre-circulated papers and thematic panels, the workshop will foster critical dialogue, collaboration, and new directions for the study of political economy and capitalism.
Public Talks and Graduate Seminar Series: “Ecologies/Economies of the Global South”
Ali Abboud, Department of Economics
This talk and seminar series will build on the successful legacy of similar events during spring/fall semester 2025 organized by AUB members of CELME (Critical Ecologies Lab in the Mediterranean East), a recently established experimental, collaborative, interdisciplinary research and education lab at the intersection of ecology, social sciences, and humanities.
The previous events were organized as a combination of public talks for a general audience and seminar/workshop for graduate students. They brought in speakers covering a wide range of topics in social sciences and humanities, aligned with CELME’s themes and foci.
In May 2025, CELME hosted an exchange meeting on “decolonial degrowth” between AUB students and faculty and the DEGROWTH research group, based at ICTA (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology) at Universidad Autonoma Barcelona.
In September 2025, CELME organized a public talk and a graduate workshop with Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, based in Chile. The public talk drew a large audience from both within and beyond the AUB community.
The graduate student workshops with the Degrowth Research Group and with Dr. Prashad generated significant interest, with enrollments of 15 and 25 students, respectively. The lectures and workshop series introduced novel approaches and perspectives on topics of broad relevance, including decolonization, degrowth and development in the Global South. They focused on the intersection of social ecologies and political economies from a Global South perspective and experience. Many AUB students write their master’s theses on these topics and can profit immensely from the insights and mentorship provided in these events.
This seminar series fills a gap in the intellectual space at AUB. The strong turnout and enthusiastic engagement so far underscore the need for a dedicated intellectual and research space for students, scholars, educators, and civil society interested in environmental, social and economic justice from a Global South perspective.
The 27th Annual Science and Mathematics Educators Conference (SMEC 27)
Rabih El Mouhayar, Department of Education
The
Science and Mathematics Education Center (SMEC) Conference is an annual professional development event that gathers 400–500 participants, mainly school science and mathematics teachers, in addition to coordinators, researchers, and faculty. This year’s event will take place on March 28, 2026, returning to an in-person format after seven online editions. The conference provides teachers with research-based ideas and classroom resources, connects them with peers and university faculty, and promotes dialogue on current challenges in teaching and learning.
2024-25
- Master Peace: Lebanon's Violence and the Politics of Expertise - Book Launching Event at AUB
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos, Department of Political Studies and Public Administration
This proposal is for funding to organize a book launching event at AUB on a forthcoming book on peacemaking in Lebanon and the Middle East in spring 2025/Fall 2026. Related disciplines are: Anthropology, Media Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Peace Studies, and Middle East Studies. The book launching event will revolve around the forthcoming publication of Master Peace: Lebanon's Violence and the Politics of Expertise (University of Pennsylvania Press, December 2024). The event will include a presentation by the author and AUB faculty member Nikolas Kosmatopoulos (PSPA, SOAN, PPIA) followed by a panel discussion with renowned scholars from outside and inside the AUB community. The panel will examine the book’s themes in the context of broader conversations about war and violence, peace-making, and crisis resolution in the Middle East from a critical postcolonial perspective.