Challenges to Gender and Women’s Studies Graduate Programs in the Middle East/ North Africa Region

The Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW), based in the Lebanese American University, is soliciting articles for the Summer/Fall 2011 issue of its quarterly publication Al-Raida. The central topic for this edition of the journal will be Challenges to Gender and Women’s Studies Graduate Programs in the Middle East/ North Africa Region.

Over the next year there will be more than ten graduate programs in gender and women’s studies in public and private universities across the Arab region. Some of the older and more well-established programs emerged out of women’s movements while the bulk of the more recent programs are the product of the energies, resources, and legitimation that the field received in the post-MDG world. In short, a complex set of factors, ranging from social movements to international governance and local university contexts, account for what is now a growing field. The new technologies of gender governance popularized as seemingly efficacious tools to ameliorate gender inequalities are increasingly having their academic effect. This special issue of Al-Raida invites contributions from Gender and Women’s Studies (GWST) programs in the MENA region to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of establishing GWST as an academic field within the Arab academy.

We are interested in receiving papers based on academic studies or critical essays from scholars active in graduate teaching in universities in the MENA region that address concerns relating to the following questions:

1. The academic discipline of Gender and Women’s Studies is well-established in many parts of the world, such as in India, Europe and North America. How do programs in the MENA field build upon this global academic field? How does the architecture of regional post-graduate curricula add to the global field?

2. What kind of indigenization strategies are deployed to build regionally grounded post-graduate educational curricula?

3. More established graduate programs in the region have a broader conception of the academic field. More recent programs are more explicitly focused on either gender and development or gender and public policy. What kinds of decisions go into the specific choices and focus areas that programmatic development takes? How have these decisions been influenced by broader political changes and gender governance platforms over the past decade?

4. How do GWST programs engage with NGO knowledge production and NGO gender training?

5. How do GWST graduate programs engage the larger Arab academy?

6. Given the challenges that the social sciences and humanities at large face in the contemporary university, how does this affect GWST programs and curricula decisions?

If you are interested in contributing to this issue of Al-Raida, kindly send your abstract (250-300 words) by December 15, 2010. All abstracts submitted are reviewed by Al-Raida's editorial staff and are subject to its approval. Once the abstract is approved contributors will have to submit their paper no later than April 1, 2011. Submissions are accepted in English, Arabic or French. All non-English submissions will be translated by IWSAW and published in English following the approval of the author.

This journal edition will be edited by Dr. Martina Rieker, Director of the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the American University in Cairo. Kindly send your emails simultaneously to the managing editor, Ms. Myriam Sfeir, at al-raida@lau.edu.lb and to the guest editor, Dr. Martina Rieker, at mrieker@aucegypt.edu