Dyala Kasim, "(Un)Sanctioned: Community Building and Intrusion in the Contemporary Arab American Novel"
In my paper, I explore Arab American community building and non-Arab American community breaking practices within the post-9/11 United States — a place of "crisis" for Arab Americans facing anti-Arab sentiment, Islamophobia and the effects of pervasive neo-Orientalism, or the “new Orientalism” that emerged post-9/11 to subjugate Arab American individuals. I study this duality through the lens of “intrusion,” which I identify as invasive acts done without seeking permission from the individual(s) receiving them, splitting the concept into the subcategories of “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned.” Sanctioned intrusion is the socially-accepted allowance for Arab Americans to encroach upon each others’ spaces, homes and lives, and manifests in different social/cultural customs, cues and behaviors. Though it can feel invasive, sanctioned intrusion is always coming from a place of love and care for Arab Americans; thus, it is an internal practice that builds connection between people. Unsanctioned intrusion is an unauthorized encroachment tactic practiced by non-Arab Americans upon Arab American spaces, homes and lives. It is an explicit exertion of neo-Orientalist power and dominance, making it an external practice that destroys connection. Through the examination of seven key contemporary Arab American novels — Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent, Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Sahar Mustafah’s The Beauty of Your Face and Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much — I argue that community building through sanctioned intrusion makes Arab Americans feel like U.S. insiders, while community breaking through unsanctioned intrusion makes Arab Americans feel like U.S. outsiders. Ultimately, intrusion becomes the channel through which these individuals humanize and liberate themselves by telling their own stories about their lives and experiences in their own words.
Moloud Soleimani, "Networks of Care: Exploring the Interconnection of Women and Children in the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement"
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, who was in the custody of Iran’s morality police for “improper” clothing, sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which, despite not achieving regime change, is widely regarded as a social revolution. To sustain the spirit of this revolution, women and girls engage in daily acts of resistance against the morality police, and those who choose to wear what they love embody hope, signaling that the struggle is far from over.
In this paper, I explore how women and children together form an intertwined network of care that keeps the revolution alive. I am investigating the potential for dialogue between childhood studies and women’s studies by examining the interconnected roles of care within the context of the Zhina revolution.
While much of the discourse centers on “saving” children or on parental discussions about current events, children have frequently played an essential role in the caregiving network, supporting their mothers while sometimes requiring their mothers to take on additional responsibilities to manage their own anxieties. This dynamic includes not only women who resist the mandatory hijab by choosing not to wear it in public but also those who believe in the hijab and wear it outside of the government’s ideology. Children may encourage their mothers to wear what they love, reassure them not to worry, and even choose to stay home to allow their parents to participate in demonstrations. In some cases, children have actively joined these demonstrations, facing grave consequences, including the loss of life.
İlayda Üstel, "Emerging from Crisis: Vulnerability and Reimagining the Present"
In this paper, I explore the alternative worlds and ways of being together that emerge during moments of collective political action. Taking recent acts of resistance by women and LGBTQI+ communities in Turkey—and the interviews I conducted with activists—as my point of departure, I focus on the fleeting moments of protest and the vulnerability of protesters. Through these interviews, I examine the new relations of care that form during protests and re-conceptualize vulnerability, not only in connection to violence but as an opening to potential social relationalities and care. Drawing on Judith Butler’s ideas on vulnerability and precarity, I argue that this vulnerability can become a generative force during collective action, transforming individual precarity into collective strength. I further extend this idea by considering vulnerability not just as a condition to be minimized, but as an opportunity for new forms of relationality, where protesters’ shared openness to one another fosters deeper networks of care and solidarity. The moments of interruption where the dominant order is interrupted that collective action leads to embody the potential to reorder the world, allowing us to glimpse and enact alternative ways of being together. In moments of crisis, when vulnerability is heightened and temporality is reordered, the present becomes the only temporality in which we can maneuver. By centering the present as a site of transformation and vulnerability as essential to building relationalities between bodies, I suggest that collective action offers liberatory practices that disrupt oppressive structures and create new forms of relationality and care.
Xuyi Zhao, "The Crisis is Coming: Time and Togetherness in China’s Pandemic Community Building"
In this paper, I take the organization of universal COVID testing as a point of departure for understanding the lived experiences of China’s zero-COVID policy and look at “the Community” (shequ) as a dynamic interface between the state and urban residents during the liminal time of a global pandemic. From early 2020 to the end of 2022, China enacted its stringent “zero-COVID” strategy to eliminate local virus transmission through frequent lockdowns, testing, contact tracing, massive quarantine, and control over travel. To urban residents across the country, this top-down initiative passed through the urban bureaucratic system to be experienced on the ground as an unquestionable state of emergency, both collectively and repetitively. In particular, the “urgency” of forestalling a crisis was built into the temporal governance of the pandemic, working to justify the blurring of public/private boundaries, excessive overtime, and mandatory orders regulating the time and space of everyday life.
The primary goal of this paper is twofold. Empirically, I seek to present an ethnographic account of how shequ was caught in between paradoxical rationalities of social cohesion and political control as a result of both aggressive pandemic state-building and the irreplaceable role of shequ organizations in providing and coordinating essential care work. Theoretically, I draw on Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight’s notion of “vernacular timespace” (2019)—the collective sense of living within a period that has a particular temporality—to analyze the timespace of zero-COVID as a state-regulated future orientation interwoven with collective anticipation of crisis, bureaucratic temporal governance, and contestations over time as a form of agency in everyday life. Instead of assuming a unitary form of present-future relationship that was homogeneous and unchallenged, I argue that the collective anticipation of a public health crisis was constantly shaped, managed, and contested throughout the processes of pandemic community building.
