CMES Seminar: Worlds of Waymaking: Viability, Orientation, and the Recalibration of Syrian Lives

Joyful crowds toppling statues, unsealing torture prisons, defacing regime iconography, ordinary people roaming freely through Al-Asad’s Presidential Palace . . . images such as these have left us in no doubt that history was being made, and in the most dramatic way: the old order—that had seemed so immoveable and all-encompassing—has gone. At the same time, the future remains unknown, and for Syrians, inside as well as outside the country’s borders, joy of the new is interlaced with fears of what could come. In this talk, I explore the current situation as a process of recalibration, which I aim to track ethnographically over the past years through three contexts in my work; with Syrian refugee youths in Jordan, with Syrian artists and documentarists based in Europe, and with Syrian Christians and their relationships to the unfolding moment. These diverse locations allow us to reflect on what it means to rebuild and reconstruct an existence during or after massive upheaval and violence, and they allow for a proposition of thinking not so much in terms of worldmaking but in terms of waymaking; passages within and between discrepant environments and realities. 

COFFEE, TEA, AND PASTRIES ARE SERVED AFTER EACH SEMINAR.
ALL WARMLY WELCMOME!