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CMES Book Launch: Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas

Cover of the book Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas
Cover: Routledge

Welcome to a book launch of the Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas with editors Dalia Abdelhady (CMES, Lund University) and Ramy Aly (American University in Cairo) and contributing authors Öncel Naldemirci (Umeå University), Ángela Suárez Collado (University of Salamanca) and Pinar Dinc (CMES, Lund University).

Event Information

Where: CMES Seminar Room (Finngatan 16, Lund) and on Zoom (scroll down to register for Zoom participation)

When: Friday 7 October 13:15-15:00

What: Bringing together different strands of research on Middle Eastern diasporas, the Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas sheds light on diverse approaches to investigating diaspora groups in different national contexts.

Asking how diasporans forge connections and means of belonging, the analyses provided turn the reader’s gaze to the multiple forms of belonging to both peoples and places. Rather than seeing diasporans as marginalised groups of people longing to return to a homeland, analyses in this volume demonstrate that Middle East diasporans, like other diasporas and citizens alike, are people who respond to major social change and transformations. Those we count as Middle Eastern diasporans, both in the region and beyond, contribute to transnational social spaces, and new forms of cultural expressions. Chapters included cover how diasporas have been formed, the ways that diasporans make and remake homes, the expressive terrains where diasporas are contested, how class, livelihoods and mobility inflect diasporic practices, the emergence of diasporic sensibilities and, finally, scholarship that draws our attention to the plurilocality of Middle Eastern diasporas.

Offering a rich compilation of case studies, this book will appeal to students of Middle Eastern Studies, International Relations, and Sociology, as well as being of interest to policymakers, government departments, and NGOs.

Speakers

Dalia Abdelhady is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. Her work features the application of postcolonial analysis to the sociology of migration. Following a comparative perspective, her work focuses on the meeting point between individual immigrants (and their communities) and institutions in receiving countries (such as schools, labour markets, media and political policies). In addition to a number of journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab Immigrant Experiences in Montreal, New York and Paris (2011), and co-editor of Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe (2020).

Ramy Aly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Ramy’s first monograph Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity was published in 2015 with Pluto Press as part of their celebrated ‘Anthropology, Culture and Society Series’. The book is the first ethnographic account of gender, race and class practices among British-born and -raised Arabs in London and attempts to provide an account of the everyday experiences of Arabness in the British capital. Ramy’s research interests and publications engage with the anthropology of ethnicity, migration and diaspora; anthropology and media studies; cultural studies; and youth cultures.

Öncel Naldemirci is Associate Professor at the Deparment of Social Work at Umeå University. He has written the chapter "Idioms of care: aging and connectivity among older Turkish migrants in Sweden" in the handbook.

Ángela Suárez Collado is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Department of Public Law, University of Salamanca. She has written the chapter "The lifecycle of Amazigh diaspora activism in Europe: from institutional pioneers to the new ethnicities of the postmodern age" in the handbook. She has a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid, and was an FPU Scholar from the Ministry of Education between 2007 and 2011. She has a degree in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Granada. She has carried out research at the Middle East Center of St. Antony's College (Oxford University), the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (Georgetown University), the Center Jacques Berque pour le Développement des Sciences Humaines et Sociales au Maroc (CNRS-Rabat), the College of Europe in Bruges and the Center for Global Cooperation Research at the Universität Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

Pınar Dinç is a researcher at CMES and the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Lund University. She has written the chapter "The semantics and substance of contesting Turkishness in the diaspora" in the handbook. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University as a Swedish Institute fellow between 2017 and 2018 and a Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellow between 2018 and 2020. Her research interests lie in the areas of nationalism, ethnicity, social movements, memory, diaspora, and the conflict and environment nexus in the Middle East and beyond. Since 2020, Pinar is leading the Turkey Beyond Borders: Critical Voices, New Perspectives project at Lund University.

Hybrid Event

The talk is held at CMES, Finngatan 16 in Lund. If you are not able to attend in-person, there is an option to attend via Zoom. Please register here for Zoom attendance: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Mofumpqj0vHdbw1-AZ6EvmD6fXvZgEZjKS