FAS professorial-rank faculty members are invited to submit applications for funding in support of travel to attend a regional or international conference in topics in Anthropology, Economics, Education, Gender, Media Studies, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, or other related fields. 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. The Bobst-AUB Collaborative Initiative offers support to applications that are not eligible for funding from the FAS Dean's Office Conference Travel Support for Professorial Faculty or to applicants who already benefitted from Dean's Office conference travel support during the same year. Priority will be given to junior faculty and first-time applicants.
Budget: Up to $2,500 for MENA and Europe; up to $3,000 for elsewhere
Application materials: Apply
online. Please upload in PDF: 1. Abstract of presentation including the conference details (name, location, date) and a budget proposal; 2. Conference acceptance letter from the organizers; and 3. 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]
2025-26
Imaginary Circles: Scrap Economies as Acts of Remaking in Lebanon and Iraq
Elizabeth Matta Saleh, Department of Sociology Anthropology and Media Studies
In our paper we use Lebanon and Iraq’ scrap metal economies to question the “circular” in circular economic models that are often advocated for in the MENA region. We propose that moving beyond closed-loop analyses and considering the “more than linear processes” involved in the life of scrap metal allows a more critical approach to the multi-scalar political endeavors involved in its recycling (Alexander & Reno 2012: 15). We propose that “remaking” rather than “recycling” might be a more beneficial term when thinking about scrap metal as it moves from spheres of waste and discard to supply chains and spheres of exchange.
In Lebanon, where there exists a splintered waste management system, profit making in the so-called circular scrap economy requires the movement of material through export –– in fact, scrap copper and iron continue to be two of the country’s leading exports. Yet the local scrap metal industry relies heavily upon workers from the so-called informal sector. These workers, many of whom are forced migrants from Syria, and whose labor ultimately buttresses Lebanon’s prospering scrap metal industry, come to shape the recovery and reentry of scrap into networks of commodity exchange. They also engage their own concepts and vocabularies, moral codes and ethical dilemmas, to give meaning and value to scrap metal in ways that are also about remaking home and household in their protracted displacement.
In Iraq, scrap networks and flows differ from Lebanon, as the country sought to maintain the scrap economy within its national boundaries. After the war against ISIS, pervasive urban destruction led the Iraqi state to ban the export of scrap abroad in the hopes of using the material in its recovery efforts. International organizations were quick to back this approach of recycling as sustainable development and livelihoods. Yet, the scrap economy in Mosul reveals that internal predation and local political dynamics erodes the capacity for circularity. Local armed groups easily co-opted the trade, using scrap as economic and political leverage. In the case of Mosul, the scrap economy reshaped post-war political economy dynamics, remaking power relations in the process.
Taken together, our case studies shed light on diverse “acts of remaking” as they are indissolubly linked to the highly disparate linkages forged, often in hodgepodge ways that are neither circular nor linear, across different local, national, global, stages of supply chains of recyclables (Alexander & Reno 2012: 15). In doing so, our work thus engages debates in waste and discard studies that question overly rigid binaries such as those between Global North and Global South.
The Enjoyment of Law and the Law of Enjoyment: The IDF in Gaza and Lebanon
Ghalya Saadawi, Department of Fine Arts and Art History
We have witnessed innumerable scenes of Israeli soldiers enjoying; dancing, cheering, desecrating homes and places of worship, playing back drone footage of live mass detonations, setting up seating areas to watch the bombing of Gaza from the hills of the settlements and towns of the Gaza envelope. What are the psychoanalytic concepts that can help us read these acts and images? How can blocking the enjoyment of the other take the form of killing, maiming, lynching? What is the racial fantasy that makes me see the other as an obstacle to my enjoyment? The “moral” production of a “target factory” of proportional and legitimate targets wants to appear rational and legal the more we see its underside horror as an irrational killing machine. To think these repetitions, we want to illuminate why the injunction to enjoy pertains to Law as liberal organizer of interests; as maintainer of peace in a market economy; as primary psychic marker of civilization; as core to subjectivity via the encounter with the signifier, etc. Enjoyment serves the superego injunctions to obey and forces the enjoyment of that obedience to the point of obscenity in eliminating the other. “Wherever there is society, there is law” includes going over and above the call of law and duty thanks to phenomena such as repressive desublimation. Enjoyment of obedience can become depraved. Soldiers embody and reproduce the violence that emerges from Law, and help us think the potential for sadism at the heart of enjoying moral duty. At multiple registers of Law, we probe these points in relation to the acts of systemic destruction.
2024-25
Exploring Consistency in Nature of Science Conceptions and Argumentation Skills Across Socioscientific Contexts
- Rola Khishfe, Department of Education
This study aimed to explore the consistency of undergraduate student teachers' conceptions of the nature of science (NOS) and their argumentation skills across various socioscientific issues (SSI) contexts. The participants were 80 undergraduate student teachers enrolled in a science methods course at six universities in Lebanon. A mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative designs, was employed to examine students' responses concerning NOS and argumentation within different SSI contexts. Data collection involved two questionnaires and interviews. The first questionnaire assessed topic-specific knowledge, while the second presented three scenarios addressing SSIs: water fluoridation, global warming, and genetically modified food. Each scenario was followed by two sets of questions: one focusing on the components of argumentation (arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttals) and the other on three key NOS aspects (subjectivity, tentativeness, and empiricism). Findings revealed variations in the levels of sophistication in argumentation components and NOS conceptions across different SSI contexts. The study concludes with recommendations for future research and practical implications for teaching NOS and argumentation in science education.
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Participation in The Materials of Magic: Between Coexistence and Resistance Workshop at NYU
Enass Khansa, Department of Arabic and NEL
I am writing to request conference travel fund. In my work on premodern/postclassical literature, and specifically on an unpublished unicum manuscript, currently held at the Escorial library in Spain, which is the topic of my book, I often encounter material that reflect popular medical knowledge that blends science with magic. This is an area of research that has been understudied and isolated from the broader questions of reception, imaginative culture, and the circulation of knowledge. Recent scholarship has been interested in remedying this gap, and a conference is being held at New York University, that brings specialists from North America. Titled, "The Materials of Magic: Between Coexistence and Resistance," the workshop is an all-day in-person series of talks, hosted through NYU’s Silsila: Center for Material Histories. With the difficult situation that the country has been going through, and the lull in holding conferences in Lebanon, exposure and connection to scholarly circles are paramount for academic growth.