Anthropology of the Middle East & North Africa
This is a 2nd year BA and Pre-MA level seminar I teach at Leiden University.
Using a combination of academic text, films, photography, street art, and social media, this course introduces students to ethnographic writing and research on key topics pertaining to the Middle East and North Africa. Students acquire basic knowledge of anthropological theories and concepts relevant to the study of Middle Eastern societies, and learn how to critically engage with disciplinary traditions and their role in the production of knowledge.
In the Time of Cities: Space, Place and Politics in the Urban Middle East
This is a MA and research MA-level seminar I teach at Leiden University.
This course explores the relationship between structural forces, individual and collective agency, and urban space in the modern Middle East, drawing on scholarly research and writing, about and from the region. Using a combination of anthropological and human geography approaches, the goal is to provoke ethnographically-grounded, critical and comparative thinking about the politics, poetics and pragmatics of urban life in the contemporary Middle East.
Social Theories and Qualitative Methods (core module)
How are theorizations of social phenomena arrived at? What constitutes evidence? How do we triangulate archival, qualitative, and statistical data? This course is meant to equip MA students with the skills and insights that are necessary to evaluate existing research and to design and carry out empirical research projects. During the course students are familiarized with key theories developed in the humanities and social sciences and their application specifically for the study of topics relating to North Africa and the Middle East. By the end of the course, students develop and carry out a small research project on a well-defined topic.