Calls for Participation

At the intersection of ecologies and power, architecture in the modern Middle East has served as both blueprint and bulldozer for ecological transformation. This session investigates how the political projects of modernization, whether colonial, nationalist, or developmentalist, manifested through radical reconfigurations of land and water, with architecture operating as the primary medium through which abstract political ambitions took material form.
From the Nile's disciplining through the Aswan High Dam to the draining of Iraqi marshlands, architecture and infrastructure became instruments of political ecology, the assertion of state power through environmental mastery. Yet these projects were competing visions of progress and tradition, East and West, scarcity and abundance. They promised to settle nomads and modernize peasants, to transform subjects into citizens through the transformation of territory itself.
This session seeks papers that critically examine these hydropolitical modernities and their architectural expressions. We are particularly interested in work that: traces the circulation of ecological expertise and imaginaries across imperial and postcolonial networks; recovers suppressed or alternative environmental knowledges; analyzes the spatial logics through which ecological interventions were represented and legitimized; explores the unintended consequences and enduring legacies of modernist environmental schemes; or examines contemporary practices that reckon with the ruins and residues of twentieth-century ecological modernization.
We welcome historically grounded work that spans from the late Ottoman period through the present, with emphasis on the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent inland territories. Methodologically, we encourage approaches that draw on architecture and environmental history, political ecology, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies to illuminate how architecture has mediated between political aspiration and ecological reality in one of the world's most environmentally contested regions.

If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Joelle Deeb ([email protected]) by February 14th.

New Directions in Language and Culture Pedagogy: Critical and Innovative Approaches

This panel brings together scholars and educators to examine emerging approaches to language and culture pedagogy in mixed and foreign language classrooms. In response to shifting student demographics, rapid technological change, and increasing calls to critically reevaluate curricular models, the panel explores how innovative teaching practices are transforming language and culture instruction. The panel highlights approaches that move beyond traditional grammar-driven and textbook-centered instruction to foreground communicative competence, intercultural awareness, and critical engagement. Panelists emphasize the integration of culture as a lived, dynamic, and contested process, encouraging students to critically reflect on issues of power, identity, representation, and social context. As a result, language classrooms are framed as sites where linguistic development intersects with questions of power, identity, representation, and social context, encouraging students to engage critically with cultural and historical narratives.
Drawing on a range of institutional settings and instructional modalities, including face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual learning environments, the panel showcases innovative curriculum design and classroom practices. Topics include the use of authentic and multimodal materials, project-based and experiential learning, virtual exchange and transnational collaboration, and community-engaged pedagogies. Panelists also discuss assessment strategies that align with these approaches and reflect on the opportunities and constraints educators face when implementing pedagogical innovation within existing institutional structures. In addition to sharing classroom-based practices, the panel engages with key theoretical frameworks such as critical language pedagogy, inclusive teaching, and decolonial approaches to curriculum design. By connecting theory with pedagogical practice, the panel offers adaptable models for diverse languages, proficiency levels, and educational contexts.
Overall, this panel contributes to ongoing conversations within MESA on the role of pedagogy in shaping knowledge production and student engagement, inviting participants to consider how critical and innovative approaches can better prepare students to navigate complex cultural realities in an interconnected world.

Archiving queer and trans world-building in Turkey and its diasporas

This panel invites consideration of the recent surge in various archival practices that inform queer cultural production in Turkey and its diasporas. It also seeks to initiate a discussion around the growing relevance and consequent vicissitudes of turning archival in queer and trans studies of the Middle East against the backdrop of various contesting discourses, most significantly the one of tightening cisheteropatriarchal authoritarianism, which has been squarely framing queer and trans issues as inauthentic imports that otherwise have no footing within non-Western settings. We invite participants whose work focuses on queer and trans issues and includes an archival dimension, either as objects or as subjects of analysis. Ethnographic methodologies have largely informed the major studies of queer and trans issues in Turkey over the last decades. One of our aims is to broaden this methodological toolkit by incorporating literary tools such as aesthetic inquiry, performance analysis, close reading, archival excavation, and textual analysis. In connection with this methodological expansion, our panel invites consideration of dimensions such as aesthetics, creativity, imagination, desire, and affect as fundamental components of queer and trans experience and of its political significance in Turkey and its diasporas. By turning our attention to queer and trans archives and archivists, our aim is not to establish fixed, identitarian notions of queer/trans archives. To the contrary, we aim to explore how and in what ways the peculiarities of queer and trans experiences in Turkey push for a reconsideration of the limits of archives. To that end, we adopt a flexible notion of the archive and the archival, which is constantly being done and undone, and figures as an ever-changing and shifting repository informed not by taxonomies and hegemonic orders of knowledge, but rather by the affects and desires of their minoritarian subjects.

If you are interested in joining this session, please submit your abstract to Enis Demirer ([email protected]) by February 10th.