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Kurdish People, History and Politics
ISSN: 2701-3030
Kurdish People, History and Politics is envisioned as a series to create new knowledge about the Kurds. The social basis of Kurdish Studies began to widen in the latter part of the twentieth century, growing in the context of major political and cultural changes on the global and regional levels including the coming to power of the Kurdistan Regional Government in the wake of the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq, the process of peace negotiation between the Turkish State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since the 1990s, and in more recent years, the struggle of the Syrian Kurds in Rojava (Northern Syria) for self-determination. In the last three decades, an expanded network of Kurdish Studies scholars have borrowed theoretical and methodological approaches from feminist studies, cultural studies, anti-colonial and anti-racist epistemology. This series pushes the boundaries of existing scholarship through a robust engagement with critiques of nationalism, patriarchy, class, colonialism, and orientalism, with the aim of contributing to the renewal of Kurdish Studies in two distinctive ways: First, it aims to prevail over the limitations imposed on knowledge production and dissemination on the Kurds and their homeland of Kurdistan, in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Second, it strives to broaden the social base of Kurdish Studies, which until the mid-twentieth century was primarily conducted by Western academics specializing in the anthropological study of the Kurdish people, languages and culture. The series encourages authors to engage with theoretical frameworks that allow a radical break with the colonial, orientalist, and nationalist traditions of knowledge production, exploring social media, democratization, border studies, and geographies of resistance in the context of Kurdish diaspora through this critical lens. We welcome proposals for monographs, oral history projects, anthologies, edited collections, and projects interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature.
4 publications
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Crosscurrents: New Studies on the Middle East
ISSN: 2381-2443
"This series will publish book-length manuscripts pertaining to the peoples of the Middle East. The Middle East is understood in the broadest sense associated with the term, and is reflective of widely shared socio-religious patterns, histories, and heritages. For the purpose of this series, the Middle East will include what is more commonly referred to as the Near East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel/Palestine); North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Chad, the Sudans, and Somalia); Turkey and Iran; Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the countries of the Arab Gulf; and, finally, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Central Asian Republics. The series will be interdisciplinary and inclusive of diverse topics and methodologies. Representative fields will include art, art history, architecture, language and literature, history, politics, economics, and religion. Reinterpretations, as well as investigations of the hitherto uninvestigated, will be especially welcomed. "
5 publications
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Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East
ISSN: 2770-9051
The purpose of this series is to demarcate and critically examine the shifting terrain of film- and media-making in the Middle East, and of practices of film and media studies regarding it, testing them both against their larger, social enabling conditions at the national, regional, and transnational levels. Titles in the series will engage recent developments in the field of Middle East film and media studies and will help point the field in an intellectually meaningful, pedagogically effective direction in relation to both current and, in some cases, significant, previously ignored older work. The series is conceived at a moment during which Middle Eastern film and film criticism have begun to develop in new directions. Recent years have witnessed a modest increase in scholarly engagement with topics and modes of inquiry often previously considered outside academic discourse. A handful of books and special journal issues published in English over the past half-decade, focusing on specific Middle Eastern countries, such as Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iran, Palestine/Israel and Turkey, as well as the long-overdue establishment of cinema studies as an emerging field of academic inquiry within universities located in the Arab world indicate a preponderance of previously unproblematized issues now circulating within the field. These include critical questions from queer and transgendered perspectives about the representation of women, and from indigenous and settler-colonial studies perspectives about the representation of migrant workers and refugees, the growing importance of documentary, digital animation and hybrid shooting, the continuing influence of global cinema imperatives, and the revival of interest in militant, revolutionary and third cinema aesthetics.
2 publications