Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

Has it really been that long? Well, my end of semester, like most academics', was packed. Once my grades were turned in, it didn't really get any easier, since I had to finish the final revisions on my dissertation and get it uploaded to ProQuest. However, that is now over--that's right, it's Dr. ajnabieh these days--and I don't have any papers to return until, ugh, Monday, so I guess I can spare a moment for the interwebs.

This semester's teaching is going well; both of my lecture courses are packed, and the students seem at least minimally engaged. (We'll see how they did on today's geography quiz, and on Friday's critical source analyses, I suppose!) I am realizing, slowly, that I can't expect undergraduate students to understand the whole breadth of things "the state" does already, so I have to, you know, explain what tax and divorce policy have to do with the politics of sex and gender (spoiler: everything), rather than them coming up with it on their own. My seminar was so small it almost got cancelled, but it's grown to a good size (5 students), and I'm quite excited to teach it.

My research is also headed in some interesting places--or at least I think they are! In particular, I've been experimenting with Storyful to organize and record data I'm collecting from Twitter on diaspora advocacy for revolutionary transitions in the Arab world. You can see the three Storyfuls I've published so far here; I think the one on Mohja Kahf is particularly interesting. As a corrollary to this, my interest in how we engage politically in online spaces, and what the methodological challenges to studying politics in digital worlds are, has only grown; so, you know, expect me to ramble about this at y'all at some point in the future. (Has anyone read any of the literature on digital ethnographies? Any suggestions?)

What else? Not much. Oh, I have a bunch of images stacked up for posts, both about food, because, well, what else do I write about? And, if you're at all interested in good indie music from the Middle East and North Africa, Mideast Tunes has been providing the soundtrack to my work life lately. I can particularly recommend Hana Malhas, who has a lovely singer-songwriter vibe in both Arabic and English, and Meen, a hip and funky combo with a lot of energy in their songs. They also seem to highlight metal music from the region, so, if that's your bag, there's plenty there for you!

And with that, I leave you--with fashion posts. Since trivial!fashion!blogging is, really, what I excel at.


( professorial fashion, or lack thereof )

I'm looking to talk to young Arab Americans about their experiences during the 2010-2011 "Arab spring." Specifically, I'm working on a paper for the 2011 Middle East Studies Association meeting, called "Party on Steinway Street: How Arab New York Interpreted The 2011 Egyptian Revolution," which will be on a panel about political science and the Arab Spring; however, I've broadened beyond looking only at New York since I wrote this abstract, and this is a part of my ongoing research on politics in Arab-American communities. I'm aiming to publish based on this research.

( Click here for project details, confidentiality, and more about me )

Please pass this along to anyone you know who might be interested in participating, or any networks you have that might produce potential interviewees! And don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions.

Two quick things, in case you haven't seen them:

1) Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, passed away today. Her work for reforestation and democratic renewal in Kenya has been incredibly important; along with Shirin Ebadi, she's probably my favorite of the recent Nobel Laureates.

I learned about her death today through an email by the president of HWS; it turns out that Prof. Maathai's two children attended HWS, and she is a former awardee of the Blackwell Medal, honoring the first woman doctor in the US, who trained here. Appropriately enough, tomorrow my introduction to comparative world politics students begin talking about what constitutes democracy. I'll be showing them the tribute video that was shown during her award ceremony, to introduce them to her work, and giving them this quote from her speech at the ceremony:

Initially, tree planting was a very benign activity, and nobody bothered us because it was mostly a bunch of women getting together and teaching each other how to plant trees. But it became important also to teach them the other aspect of the linkage that I talked about: the linkage of governance. It's one thing to manage the resource, another to touch governance. Now who is in charge of resources, especially resources like forest, water, soil and land? It's usually the government that’s in charge. The people in power are usually in charge of these resources. And when you talk about managing those resources sustainably, accountably, transparently, sharing these resources equitably, you are stepping on the very big toes of those in power.

When we started talking about the importance of protecting forests and rivers, it meant that we would have to explain to the people in power how the resources were being poorly managed and how sometimes they are privatized by the people who are in charge, and how sometimes you get mismanagement, like illegal logging and cultivation in the forests. We started realizing that it is very important to hold our leaders accountable for the way they manage resources because they are not the owners of the resources; they are custodians. We put them in positions of authority to manage the resources for us because all of us cannot be managers. They are not supposed to privatize them, they are not supposed to own them and they are not supposed to exploit them to enrich themselves all at our expense.

When we started pointing out these problems in the government, that said that we were not doing what we were supposed to be doing. They told us to just plant trees and not worry about what happens to the forest, what happens to the waters. And of course we could not do that because that's part of the second leg, the second pillar, of what I talked about. Sustainable management, good governance. Good governance means you have to hold your leaders accountable, and you cannot hold your leaders accountable if you do not know how these resources are managed. That is when the Greenbelt movement started being seen as a dangerous organization.

2) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote in Shura council and municipal elections. Not in the elections happening next week; no no no, in the next round of elections, the ones in 2015.

I've written before about the role of symbolic rights in felt political injustice, and I would argue that the right to vote for an "advisory" body in a monarchical system is something that is definitely symbolic, but also very meaningful. However, I'm also very skeptical. If you know anything about Kuwaiti politics, this move looks very familiar: it's reminiscent of the 1999 emiri decree, which I've argued elsewhere fell not because of misogyny pure and simple, but because of the attendant anti-democratic nature of the decree and its position in parliament/monarchy battles. (I've realized this conference paper isn't online anywhere, but if anyone wants a copy, let me know--it's currently in the article-shop-around phase.) It's worth noting that the time Kuwaiti women got voting rights, and it stuck, it was because of cooperation between legislative and monarchical forces, not because of a top-down imposition. Now, granted, the Saudi Shura council probably isn't strong enough to cancel out a royal decree (the Kuwaiti parliament has substantially stronger rights), but it would not surprise me even a tiny little bit if sometime in the next four years this right disappears.

In any case:

• Al Jazeera English article on the decree
• Global Voices roundup on it
• Two Jezebel articles here and here; I find it interesting to see how these events are framed for a Western feminist audience, and how the comment section/public discourse builds up.

I have a Real Substantive Post brewing, but before I got it done, I thought I'd pop my head in and wave. Hello! I am back from the abyss! Er, by which I apparently mean Twitter?

Life is settling in here; we're into our second week of classes (which means I'm located somewhere between Dr. Koshary, who's been teaching for three-four weeks already, and Tenured Radical, for whom the first day of school was Labor Day--though Labor Day was a school day here as well!), and my students are doing well, although they demonstrate a shocking inability to remember Moldova is in Europe and Suriname is in South America (yes, today was geography quiz day). My family is enjoying having a little more space, having relocated from a 2-bedroom apartment which we shared with a roommate to a 3.5 bedroom house complete with full attic, basement, and other assorted accountrements. (Fun fact: our furniture we brought from the other house? Basically fills this one.) I'm enjoying living somewhere with easy proximity to locally grown produce, and busily putting things up for the winter. (Lots of broccoli. Lots of lots of broccoli. Anybody got advice for what I should do with sugar plums?) And I'm really, really, really loving having an office to myself, a ten-minute walk from my house. Really. Words cannot even describe.

So, until I'm back, two quick teaching-fashion outfits for you. The first is the first day of school, when I had no teaching but wanted to look presentable for students. The second is today's teaching outfit.








I didn't manage to photograph my favorite outfit of last week: black pants/jacket, blue and white striped button down, blue and grey striped tie), but I will tell you that, as I taught my last class wearing it, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, chalk dust on my tie, I thought: damn, I wish the official school photographer were here. I look awesome.

(Ahem, I apologize for the brief detour into food blogging. Food is one of my favorite things to write about, and I don't often get the chance. Fear not, I'll try to come back to politics at some point...unless you really want to hear my deep thoughts about food.)

When I wrote my post on fuul akhdar, geeksdoitbetter left a comment asking me to square two of the things I said: that "deviating too much from that shape [of a recipe] results in doing a discredit to the original dish" and that "there are a million iterations" of every dish. I haven't responded, because I've been thinking of the best way to explain what I mean, but a confluence of things today lead to me arriving at a good way in.

Let's talk about hummus.

As I've mentioned 'round these parts before, hummus in Arabic means "chickpeas," and the dish we call hummus in English is generally called hummus bi tahineh, chickpeas with sesame seed paste. You'll find a dish like it in most of the Levantine countries.

However, there are lots of variations of hummus. Do you use paprika, or cumin, or za'atar, or garlic, or mint? How much tahineh? How much lemon? Do you serve it hot or cold? All of these factors can move and shift from recipe to recipe; there are some broad national differences, but there are also little family differences.

But, here is the thing: there is a point beyond which you're not making hummus anymore. Or not proper hummus, not the real thing. You've distorted it just past the point where it is what it is; you've made it something else.

Take this NYTimes article about Holy Land Hummus, and all the different varieties they release. What's the opening quote from the owner? "Back home, they would shoot me in the head for doing this to hummus." An exaggeration, but there's a truth in there: artichoke-garlic hummus is just wrong, in that it deviates too much from the original shape of the dish.

(Interesting, parenthetical note. Majdi Wadi is described in the article as being born in Kuwait, and having immigrated from Jordan to the US in 1994. There's a fact that's being elided here: that he's almost certainly Palestinian, given that information. After the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait expelled its large Palestinian population, both immigrants and Kuwaiti-born, because of the PLO's statements in support of Saddam Hussein. These Palestinians were "repatriated" to Jordan, which, for most of them, was a country they had never seen; however, since Jordan formally governed the West Bank from 1948-1967, they had Jordanian passports. Many then emigrated again, to the US or Europe. Probably the most famous Jordanian with this life history? Queen Rania. This is one of those moments where context adds a great deal of depth.)

Or, to take another example, let's talk about a tweet I saw today. The tweeter, sseham, says, "I could sit for hours and watch Arab expressions as they learn about this site," and links to the webpage for a product called "Crazy Camel Dessert Hummus."

I had to get pretty far down the webpage before I realized that was D-E-S-S-E-R-T, and not D-E-S-E-R-T. (Maybe I was distracted by rolling my eyes at the 'crazy camel' business.) Because, if I were to try to match up two words in the English language I would never want to see next to each other, they would be "dessert" and "hummus." Partially, that's because I'm a gluten-free baker, and I know what a disaster it is to try to bake with chickpea flour, which dominates pretty much anything you try to bake it with and requires herculean efforts to make edible. And it's partially also because...that's not hummus. It's just...it's just NOT.

Hummus isn't just a puree of chickpeas. (It's also not a puree of just any legume: white bean hummus, for instance, is wrong in a lesser, but related way.) It's a broad set of ways of combining chickpeas with a limited set of other ingredients. Small innovations one way or another make sense; but there's a point at which those who know the dish would say, well, this could be good, but it's just not hummus anymore.

(And, to give you an example where it's not just "other" food that is "cultural" in origin: In my family, we make corn pudding, a sweet custardy dish, for family holidays. I was visiting my sister and her mother for Easter this year, and her mother made corn pudding. It was very different from the way my mother makes it: frozen corn instead of canned creamed corn, vanilla instead of nutmeg, and I think some bourbon, which was totally new to me. But I recognized it as corn pudding. If she had given me, say, something with less milk and more eggs, and called it corn pudding, I would have very politely accepted it, while muttering in my head, "No it isn't, it's a crustless corn quiche.")

So, while there are lots of different ways to make hummus, there are some ways to not make hummus while still making chickpea purees. Some things you do with chickpeas are wrong.

And this isn't purely an academic distinction. I'm thinking of all the many conversations about food as culture that I've seen Arab-Americans having. (here's a lovely moment I can't cite right now, but I think is in a piece by Nada Elia, about seeing people order hummus on their falafel sandwiches, and feeling betrayed that people would eat her food but not doing it properly. Food means identity for many, many people; it means identity in particular for many ethnic and racial minorities, because eating different food is part of what defines them as different. So there is a hurt that comes from seeing something that is yours, a part of you, pervasively done wrong by others, in order to meet their standards. Particularly if you think, were you to explain to them what they're doing wrong, they wouldn't be able to hear you say it.

There is no hummus police out there, and I don't want to take on that role. (Although, OK, if it meant eating a lot of hummus, I'd give it my best.) But I think it's important, as food moves around between places, that we recognize that you can't do just any thing to just any food, and give it any name. Names have meaning, both literal and figurative. And there are questions of justice that attach to this naming process, which it's worth it to remember when we're eating, and speaking about food.

I think of myself as reasonably well sartorially stocked for formal professional occasions: I've got a black suit, I've got a bunch of suit separates and blouses and things like that.  Plus, you know, I'm a grad student, how many suits do I need However, I just encountered a fashion challenge that my closet was unequipped for: what to wear for a high formality professional event held in the heat of the summer.

This was the conclusion I reached.



I have to admit, it took me a long time to be convinced by the short sleeved blazer.  It felt...just wrong, somehow.  Blazers have SLEEVES.  This is in their nature! Anything else is a violation of their natural rights as blazers! Why don't I just wear a vest if I'm going to violate all that is good and right in business attire?!?!

After many rounds of trial and error, however, I reconciled myself to the outfit, because of the clear truth that my arms are freakin' fierce.  Might as well show it off.


again with the toddler photobombing

The neckline on this top is a new one for me: what do you think? I felt very covered up, but I liked the shape it made, both in the blazer and out of it.

(And let's not talk about my pink manicured fingernails.  I still have some cognitive dissonance over that.)

What do you think about summer business wear?  Is it all about fabric, or cut, or color for you? How do you summer-ize an outfit?

I am watching two political struggles going on today. The first is the attempt to get the New York State Senate to pass a bill allowing same-sex marriage. The second is the "Women 2 Drive" protest in Saudi Arabia, where dozens of women who hold international driver's licenses are driving in violation of the law. (Check the Twitter hashtag if you want to see what's going down right now, on 6/17.)

The differences here are obvious and striking. One is about negotiating within a highly fractious electoral public, and mobilizing constituent power for and against a political position that's at the center of ongoing debates. The other is about civil disobedience against an authoritarian government, in the hopes of mustering transnational support for a change in policy. But what I keep coming back to is that both of these struggles are about symbolic rights.

I support both these demands. In fact, I'm spending a lot of my time engaged in the one that's happening in my home state (*ahem*). And I think the Saudi protest is pretty amazing, considering precisely how hard it is to mobilize any action at all in KSA. By calling these "symbolic rights," I'm not trying to diminish the importance of the claim, nor the strength of those making it.

But the centrality of driving to Saudi women's protest is largely about its symbolic value. Of all the injustices that Saudi women cope with--an enforced dress code, highly segregated work opportunities, unequal access to marriage and divorce, etc--driving seems relatively minor by comparison. And yet, it isn't: it's a daily insult to their personhood that, despite being autonomous adults with responsibilities and roles in the world, they have to be driven around like ten year olds going to soccer practice. The symbolic injustice so rankles that it becomes a mobilizing force for change.

I feel similarly about marriage. Frankly, in the world where I am philosopher-king, there would be no state-recognized marriages. 'Marriage' would be a purely social bond, which people could enter into or not enter into as they saw fit, in whatever configurations they felt appropriate. Simultaneously, the state would allow people to formally establish family relationships (among couples raising children, friends collectively supporting each other, siblings caring for an elderly parent, etc) which would provide for legal rights such as hospital visitation, tax benefits for providing unpaid caring work, rights of survivorship, etc. Being 'married' would be one thing. Being a legal unit would be another.

I don't get to be philosopher-king, so that's not how it works. But, even in this world, marriage isn't the battle I would put first of all my queer rights. I'd rather we were fighting harder for non-discrimination legislation, for the inclusion of material on LGBT issues in educational institutions, to make it easier for trans people to legally transition, and for rights to adoption and parenthood. And, frankly, I am married--I've got the white dress and the credit card debt to prove it, and anybody who tries to tell me I'm not is both empirically wrong and a douche of epic proportions, as far as I'm concerned.

And yet, it rankles whenever I look at my "legal docs" file, and realize that I have to have a will, a power of attorney, a health care proxy, and a living will to give my wife the same rights that straight couples get merely for registering their relationship. It rankles when I say "my wife" and people respond "your partner." (No disrespect to the many same-sex and opposite-sex couples I know who use partner; I think it's a good word. It's just not mine.) And, yes, it rankles that if I were an infertile man, my name would be on my son's birth certificate as his father even though he was conceived with donor sperm, but because I'm a woman I had to drop thousands of dollars and collect letters of reference to earn the right to be his legal parent.

The insult to me, and to thousands of queers like and unlike me, is enough that it's worth fighting for. And the massive insult that the Republican caucus can't even decide to bring this to a vote--and that thousands of people are mobilized to condemn my relationship--well, that makes me want to get a big angry sign and go yell at somebody, long and loud.

The deep political insight here is the one that Axel Honneth makes so clearly in his work--that the vast majority of injustices that people experience are injustices based in misrecognition, the sense that something crucial and important about yourself is being disregarded, misinterpreted, or silenced in social interactions. And the more daily one is that disrespect is a key experience of being an oppressed group within a society. Symbolic victories are real, because they undo this disrespect, and counter with the sort of recognition that make societies possible.

So, yes, I'm cheering for the women in Saudi who are driving through the streets, and hoping for their safety. Yes, I'm dropping emails to state senators, bombarding my poor Facebook friends with action links, and endlessly refreshing New York 1's website. Because symbolic rights are rights nonetheless, and we all deserve them.

And you know if the law passes, my ass is getting married. Again.

I'm happily back from WPSA, which was a blast; for folks like me, who work in odd corners of the field of political science, it's a tremendously productive place to have conversations that can be difficult to have in larger poli sci conferences. I sat around and talked about how to integrate queer theory into interpretive methodologies! There were multiple panels on feminist theoretical concerns per timeslot! It was awesome! Also, San Antonio is a fun place to be, so there was that.

As planned, we recorded our session, called "It's Not Facebook, It's Fieldwork! Conducting Interpretive Research Using Social Networking Technology." It's largely a conversation between myself and Renee Cramer of Drake University; we had one other participant, who didn't identify himself for the audio, but who made some great contributions. (My sister also gamely showed up, though she doesn't appear on the tape.)

The conversation was incredibly productive; Renee and I found a lot of common problems and reasons for turning to social networks to gather data, and I think made some productive comparisons. (Although, my favorite moment was the exchange "Have you found a better way to save data than to just copy it into Word?" "Nope." "Dammit.") In addition, I got to highlight the work that fan scholars are doing in changing how we think about citation and data-gathering on the internet; acafandom has done some impressive critical work that I think has ramifications for all of us doing research in online environments, and I'm glad to be able to share that.

The audio is just under an hour long; I haven't prepared a transcript yet, though I'm hoping to do so eventually. It's available for download on my mediafire page here, in m4a format. I've tried to edit the metadata in iTunes so that it has our names and my contact info; let's hope that works.

Please feel free to pass the file or this post along to anyone you know who would find it useful!

(PS: I know I did stuff for 3W4DW last year, but, well, since I don't crosspost anywhere, I didn't really know what to do this time. Anybody have particular things they want me to do? Go on and ask; if I get a chance, I'll be happy to!)

I don't think any of you are located in San Antonio, Texas, or happen to be attending the Western Political Science Association meeting there next week, but, well, I want a stable URL to direct people to about this panel, so here goes!

Next Thursday, April 21, at 8AM, I and Renee Cramer of Drake University will be running a roundtable called "It's not Facebook, It's Fieldwork! Conducting Interpretive Research Using Social Networking Technology." We'll be talking about both practical and epistemological issues with using social networking tech as part of our research, whether as fieldsite, source of connections, or as a set of texts to be studied. Renee's research focuses around midwifery and motherhood discourse, and she uses Facebook to follow groups and recruit interview subjects; I work on the Arab community in New York City, and use Facebook to maintain connections with institutions and individuals from my fieldwork. (I also have a sideline in acafandom, which is clearly all about the online social networks.)

If you can't make the roundtable, but are interested in the material, we plan on making an audio or video recording of it, and distributing it afterward, so that other people can use it as a resource. I'll post it here when it's done.

And, to make this a not-totally-pointless post for my DW friends, here's a question: what counts as a "social networking technology" in your minds? Is DW such a technology?

For my fellow academics, do you think about social networking as something that plays into your research or career trajectory, or is it something entirely other? Something I'm puzzling through for this panel is the public/private distinction, which is radically eradicated by using a "personal" technology for "professional" purposes--lots of my research "subjects," for instance, know about my son's hilarious opinions on vegetables, and the terrible pop music I listen to while editing srs bznz chapters about their lives. That would seem to change the research process in some way--but I'm not yet entirely sure how.

I am a great lover of the visual arts, despite the fact that I have a) no personal aptitude for them and b) no critical education in how to think about them. All I know is that I would very much like to become a purchaser of art in my future life, when I someday am not living on a grad student's salary.

In any case, Diwan introduced me to a bunch of amazing visual artists I had never encountered before, producing breathtaking work that is intensely politically critical but also aesthetically stunning. Although I'm glad for the performance artists and writers I encountered, too, it's the visual artists that I'm most enthusiastic about.

I've combined them all into a post, because I am lazy. Sorry about that.

Note: There are a bunch of videos in here, none of which have transcripts (except for some of the interviews in the documentaries, which are subtitled in English because they were conducted in Arabic). If anybody needs either a transcript or a summary, I'd be happy to provide.)

( John Halaka, painter and documentary filmmaker )

( Reem Gibriel )

( Ayad Alkadhi )