The pilot program on “Minorities in the Middle East,” funded by the Mellon Foundation, examined the question of how the concept of minority (religious and ethnic) has emerged as a key factor in the cultural, economic, political, religious, and educational lives of modern Middle East and North African nation-states. During 2019-2021, faculty and graduate students from across the humanities and social sciences successfully implemented the first phase of a larger curricular project with the aim of transforming Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA, building towards designing a new blueprint for pedagogy about the region.
Through a series of talks, workshops, and faculty-graduate student research groups, faculty and graduate students who participated in the project explored the
historical dynamics of inter-communal conflict and contacts with the goal to further curricular development at UCLA and beyond. These programmatic initiatives, which considered histories, ethnographies, biographies, and works of fiction, also addressed some of the indigenous local Islamic theories of ethnicity and minority as an introduction to the understanding of the policies adopted by states towards minorities and the influence of Western discourses on minorities.
The talks and workshops organized as part of the program are available through the CNES website. We have also created a list of bibliographic sources, modules and teaching materials, including a syllabus on minorities in the MENA region which we hope will be useful as pedagogical sources for schools and university in California and beyond. A culminating international conference in January, 2022 brought together a host of experts to address the question of minoritization in the MENA region.
Faculty & Student Participants:
Ali Behdad, Lamia Balafrej, Aomar Boum, Kevan Harris, Asma Sayeed, Susan Slyomovics, Luke Yarbrough, Wisam Alshaibi, Izem Aral, Jesse Arlen, Burcu Buğu, Robert Farley, Timothy Garrett, Ava Hess, Rachel Smith, Jessie Stoolman, Atiyeh Taghiei.
Averroës Lectures Series
Mellon Foundation awards grant to CNES