Date: Saturday, November 4, 2023 

Time: 11:00 AM, Montreal Time

Location: The Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Montreal, Canada 

Language: English 

The resurgence of autocracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring has created a reality in which academics face restrictions in their access to the ground while a cohort of human rights organizations have grown to capture this space. Complementary as they are, collaborations between these communities remain minimal despite tremendous potential. This roundtable brings together practitioners and academics to bridge the gap between different vocabularies and domains of access in an attempt to foster more areas of collaborations. We encourage participants to think of how data collection and analysis developed over the last decade and how do we incorporate it into academic work? What are the potential funding resources for joint projects between academics and local and international NGOs? How can both fields work to incorporate research into larger social impact campaigns? How do we manage risks on the ground, both for researchers and participants? How can different types of theorizing, methodologies, and concepts in both fields be complementary, if at all? And finally, how do we interrogate our respective lexicons to center participant experiences outside of disciplinary and developmental jargon? 

More details about the roundtable here.