Dissent: Popular Uprisings in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa
MESAAS Graduate Conference 2025
Call for Papers
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University is pleased to invite academic essays from graduate students and early career scholars from across universities and departments for the 2025 Graduate Conference to be held on the 10th and 11th of April 2025. The annual MESAAS graduate conference has been an enriching space for scholars, activists and artists to confront and examine issues of political, social, and ethical concern that connect regions of the global south. This year, our conference invites abstracts for the theme, Dissent: Popular Uprisings in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
We live in a time of social turbulence and political crises, defined both by oppressive regimes and by peoples’ enduring ability to resist them — from Palestine, to Kashmir, to Bangladesh, to Kenya and Sudan. The form of popular uprisings, however, is ever changing; and so are the political, ethical and cultural frameworks within which they are understood. This year’s conference will focus on the myriad forms of uprising, bringing together graduate students from across the social sciences and the humanities to think through and alongside historical and contemporary people’s movements in our regions of study. We are particularly interested in de-centering North-Atlantic frameworks of knowledge and foregrounding intellectual thought and political praxis — both modern and premodern — that have been developed in the regions themselves.
We invite abstracts from across the humanities and social sciences, and encourage cross-disciplinary perspectives on the topic. The questions we hope to engage with include, but are not limited to, the following:
● Rethinking pre-colonial rebellion and temporalities of history
● Perspectives on colonial era uprisings
● Evolution of popular rebellion throughout history
● Popular movements in a world before and after nation states
● Popular movements as anticolonial praxis
● Violence and/or non-violence as political strategy
● Role of religion and faith in collectivizing mass movements
● Popular critique and the rhetoric of dissent
● Secularism, nationalism, and other ‘–isms’ of modernity
● Identity, subjectivity, and regimes of othering
● Memory, memorialization, archiving of popular history
● Popular culture and media in contemporary politics
● Reconceptualisations and translations of intellectual-philosophical concepts
As with previous years, the conference will be hybrid (in-person and on zoom) and we especially encourage scholars from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa to apply, and, if possible, to attend in person. Unfortunately, we will not be able to support with funding for travel or accommodation.
The abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please include a short 100-word biography with your submission. Notification of paper acceptance will be sent by March.
Deadline for abstracts is February 10, 2025. Please submit them here: https://forms.gle/USqSUXQimGAS8b7HA. If accepted, final papers are due April 1st.
You can follow the conference on our Twitter page: https://twitter.com/MESAAS_GSA
Please direct any questions to the following email: mesaasgraduateconference@gmail.com
We look forward to welcoming you to our conference.
Warmly,
MESAAS Graduate Student Conference 2025 Organizing Committee