Hope, Waiting, and Ethnographies of the ‘Not Yet’ from a Global Middle East
Presented During:
Sat, 11/22: 12:45 PM - 2:15 PM
Sheraton
Submission Number:
5651
Submission Type:
Roundtable/Town Hall
Co-Organizer:
Organizer/Submitter:
Discussant:
Presenter(s):
Kyle Craig
Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology
Abstract:
"I am going to marry her," boasts a 19-year-old man living in Gaza. When? I ask. "After the war." More than four-hundred days after Israel's 2023 ceaseless bombardment and blockade of Gaza had begun, he was anticipating its end. An end that would mark the beginning of the next chapter of his life. He waits, with hope for an end, to genocide. This roundtable considers "hope" and "waiting" as categories of analysis for everyday life in the Global Middle East–a transnational geography that accommodates the global circulation of people, ideas, and goods from this region. It explores what everyday actors in this global geography are "waiting for" or "waiting on", whether this waiting is active or passive, shedding light on their power and control over possibilities. It examines the temporal politics and poetics of waiting in a region that contends with authoritarianism, colonial violence, migration, and neoliberalism. Waiting in these contexts leads many to depression and hopelessness and also to creativity and innovation. This roundtable asks how people across this region (and its diasporas) experience and manage waiting and hope differently. Waiting, for some, hinges on the hope for better social, political, legal, and economic conditions. But what happens when waiting leads to perpetual deterioration of all of these conditions for everyday actors who are the subjects of neoliberal structural and institutional forces? What can one hope for? Can one organize around a politics of hope under such conditions? What does a consciousness of that which has not yet arrived look like for those waiting for a better future just beyond reach?
Primary Section:
Middle East Section
Comments to the Executive Program Chair and AAA Meetings Team
If you or your group has any requests-- i.e. religious, academic, disability, time zone, or personal conflicts, please indicate below. Please note that every effort will be made to accommodate requests, but we cannot guarantee this. If you need your session to be virtual for accessibility purposes, please enter your request here. As the organizer, please inform your co-panelists to email individual access requests related to disability and scheduling to [email protected].
NOTE: Comments will be viewed and considered when scheduling.
Our group does not have any accommodation requests.
Proposals that demonstrate a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a thoughtful analysis of power structures and relations will be given priority. How does your proposed session help fulfill this commitment. You are encouraged to characterize the diversity of proposed session participants with respect to organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, ability status, sexuality, gender, class, and national identity.
Our roundtable will examine the prevalence or absence of hope among a globally marginalized population in the Middle East. We aim to expose the structural imposition of neoliberal policies and economic systems that lead to precarious lives be they in war zones or otherwise, for populations that wait, in anticipation of better conditions. Participants are international and domestic, identify as cis and queer, from elite and public institutions, and include faculty, postdocs, and a grad student.
You have unsaved changes.