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Faculty College Announced May 21-23, 2018

Join us for a faculty college on Mobility and Movement. The faculty college will support the formation of this borderless interdisciplinary learning community. The learning community will create open educational resources, collaborative classes,  and produce interdisciplinary research that recasts limiting notions of migration with inclusive ideas of mobility and movement. For more information, contact Amyaz Moledina and Ibra Sene at College of Wooster, and Isis Nusair at Denison University or register here.

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Wooster’s Picture Gallery 2016-17

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GLCA International Studies Conference

The culminating event of the Challanging Border’s series for 2017 was the GLCA Undergraduate International Studies Research Conference in Kauke Hall. The goal was to share and celebrate our collective inquiry in global and international studies.

Students from Albion, Allegheny, Denison, Oberlin, and Wooster presented their research to professors, parents and thier assembled peers.

Half of the conference were devoted to understanding cotemporary issues in international studies, such as water politics, the effects of UN organizations, social capital, political autonomy of INGOs, women’s rights movements in Morrocco, and police violence in Latin America. The other half of the presentations focussed on historical and contemporary issues in migration studies.

For example, Erin Worden ’17 from Dension University tried to make feminist sense of sexual violence of refugee women in Greek migratory routes. She argued that “Women’s bodies are on the frontlines on war.” She found that, “sexual violence targeting refugee women in the Eastern Mediterranean-Balkan route attempts to establish hegemonic masculinity, though these women actively contest this power by exercising agency.”

Sarah Strum ’17 from College of Wooster designed a quantititve study to show how negative racial and ethnic stereotypes about Syrain refugees affected public support for relocatation. After reviewing the literature that suggested that economics and ideological factors determined support for rellocation, she found statistical evidence that internalized negative racial and ethnic stereotypes of refugees, decreases support for refugee relocation.

One highlight from the program was the faculty panel on migrations. Dr. Nusair presented preliminary ethnographic research on Syrian refugees in Germany and Dr. Miller presented his work on the Turkish Guest worker program that began in the 1960s. A full program is available here. GLCA Intl Studies Undrgrd Rsrch Conf 2017

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Alia Malek reflects on her new memoir

Students from the College of Wooster, Kenyon, and Denison congregated in Granville to hear Alia Malek read and answer questions from her recently released memoir, The Home that was our Country. We were lucky to be the first stop in the public launch of the book.

Malek is an author and civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, she began her legal career as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. She has worked in the legal field in the U.S., Lebanon, and the West Bank until she returned to complete a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Since then, she has written for various international media outlets including New York Times and Jadaliyya. She has authored multiple books including “A Country called Amreeka”. In 2016, she was awarded the 12th annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities.

Alia Malek at Denison

In her memoir she weaves stories about her family in Syria and the United States with the socio-political history of the region. At the talk, she narrated the complicated nature of her family’s personal journeys between Syria and the United States. She highlighted definitive moments in her life such as a visit to Syria after she graduated from high school. In this story about her arrival at the Syrian airport, “camcorder in hand”, she deftly illustrates her journey to finding a voice in the presence of the arbitrary policy practices of the Syrian regime.

One aspect that Malek dwelled upon was sectarianism and the problematic way in which the media and the west understands the Syrian and Middle Eastern conflict. She quoted Bassem Haddad who argues that when we hear about the Middle East “One finds very little about the political connections of these rulers with their regional and international supporters/bankrollers.” Their complicity is just as important as those of the local elites in telling the story of the Arab uprisings.

Further, Bassem Chit, has suggested that, “Sectarianism’s role in the political and ideological arena has always been centred on redefining a crisis in a new ideological form – an attempt to reproduce a “new” hegemony to conceal the crisis of bourgeois society. The reason why religion still plays an important role in defining political expression in Arab and Middle Eastern societies is due to Western colonial rule. Capitalism created both nationalism and sectarianism, defined as a reaction and a by-product of the crude social transformations it generated.

Before colonial occupation, religious institutions in the Middle East did not rise to the commanding heights as those in the West. Instead they played a servile role to the existing autocracies. Under the Ottoman Empire the Qanun (the secular legal system) coexisted with religious law (Sharia).

During the period of deteriorating feudal power religious institutions shifted their allegiance to the new bourgeois classes, and in some cases these institutions expanded their power base through the acquisition of land or by encouraging capitalist investments in land under their control.”

During most of the last five centuries, modern-day Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, groups of Orthodox, Catholic, and other Christians; Alawis, Ismailis, and other sorts of Shia Muslims; and Yazidis, Kurds, Jews, and Druze lived in enclaves and in neighborhoods in the various cities and towns alongside Sunni Muslim Arabs.  The concept of a state, much less a nation-state, did not enter into political thought until the end of the 19th century. Inhabitants of the various parts of what became Syria could move without feeling or being considered alien from one province of the Ottoman Empire to the next. Thus, if the grandfathers or great grandfathers of people alive today were asked about what entity they belonged to, they would probably have named the city or village where they paid their taxes.

To understand Syria today, it may be better to study this “contact zone” historically with reference  to global and local process that shaped the extant power relationships.

With Wooster students

Transcript of Speech by Alia Malek at Denison U.

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Student Reflections – National Bird

Reflection assignment for Wooster’s class on Globalization and Contemporary China. By Catherine Lockwood. 

Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird (2016) discusses the negative effects of American drone strikes on Afghani people. The documentary focuses on three people that work in the Air Force, intelligence systems, and drone surveillance systems and that speak against the government for killing innocent people during drone strikes. The first person to be interviewed has post-traumatic stress disorder from her experience in the Air Force. Her job was to decide which people classified as terrorists they should attack in Afghanistan. While she received training to identify the right people, she also knew that she could never be completely sure who she was killing. She is particularly traumatized by the civilians she killed and the amount of death she was forced to see. Despite her clear long-lasting effects of directing drone strikes, the job was aimed at younger people between the ages of 18 to 24 just like her.

The Air Force is advertised to the public as a method of helping other countries defend themselves and protecting the United States from receiving more terrorist attacks. In fact, the government hides a great deal of information from the public on how they attack Afghani people and the anxiety it brings to people who work for the Air Force. The government does not provide help to people who fly drones because they do not consider them to have seen combat. Because of the lack of aid given to Air Force soldiers and the hidden information to the public, many people in Afghanistan die without reason. The United States government denies its citizens freedom of speech by limiting the American people in their ability to speak out about corrupt warfare that needs to be known to save humanity.

 

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Student Reflections on National Bird

Reflection assignment for Wooster’s class on Globalization and Contemporary China. By Brenton Kalinowski.

The documentary film National Bird, by Sonia Kennebeck, examines a few different perspectives on the use of drones by the US government in situations of war. These perspectives are the consequences for whistleblowers in the government, the trauma that can result from operating drones, and the on the ground results and inaccuracies of drone strikes. The film was very successful in providing this information and telling the stories of those involved without telling the viewer what to think, but rather allowing them to make their own conclusions. While I personally find great issue with the use of drone strikes, I support the way that the film did not clearly push a political stance and take an overly subjective approach of its own. I felt that the overall effect this left was to strengthen the legitimacy of the stories and images. In reality I am sure that Kennebeck views drones strikes negatively and her film is a way of spreading a political point. Not forcing this political point on viewers was simply an effective way of creating a more powerful documentary.

Returning to the three perspectives the film showed. The aftermath of strikes and how targets are sometimes wrongly chosen was the most troubling part to watch. One specific example given was a caravan of innocent civilians who were bombed by a drone traveling home from a funeral, resulting in the deaths of men women and children. The transcript of the drone operators and their superiors is particularly disturbing. They talk about the people in a very dehumanizing manner and seem to be trying to find excuses to fire. Even though they see children, they talk back and forth about how a 12-year-old with a gun can be dangerous. As if that is enough reason to kill them. One woman who they interview for the film, a former drone operator, describes the lengthy training that she had to go through to be able to identity women and children as well as weapons. This shows that collateral damage is not actually accidental, but rather, it comes from a lack of concern from some drone operators. I believe that the distance drones create from the operators and the people they kill creates a desensitizing effect. I hope that people speaking out, as some have done in this film, will place pressure on the government.

 

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Sonia Kennebeck to screen documentary on the human cost of US drone program

The College of Wooster is excited to host Director Sonia Kennebeck who will screen her film, “National Bird” on Tuesday Feb 21st at 7:30 pm in Scheide. The event is free and open to the public. The film is an investigative documentary that explores the complex issue of drone warfare from a human perspective. Through this film, the director/producer, Sonia Kennebeck hopes to enrich the public discourse on the U.S. drone program. The film illuminates the impact the drone program has on people – veterans and survivors. It asks the audience to confront the human side of the drone program. In a recent article in the Guardian – Heather Linebaugh, one of the whistleblowers wrote: “Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.” Another drone operator echoes, “Its like borders don’t matter anymore”.

Like previous advancements in military technology, combat drones have transformed warfare, outpacing the ability of legal and moral frameworks to adapt and address these developments. A broad public discourse is critical to understanding the social cost of drone warfare.

Screening and Conversation with the director is sponsored by: Global and International Studies, Political Science, Cultural Events and the GLCA Grand Challenge Grant. Wooster’s Grand Challenge Grant will build an interdisciplinary research and learning community beyond the borders of our educational institutions. Our goal is to recast limiting notions of migration towards inclusive notions of mobility and movement. We also want to extend the idea of mobility to include objects and ideas and suggest that mobility is part of being. In inviting Kennebeck, we are exploring how mobile war technology has altered the forms of interaction between soldiers, states, citizens, and the victims of war.

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Sayed Kashua’s Lecture

Sayed Kashua launched our Challenging Borders series with a discussion on “Transgressing Boundaries: Culture as a vehicle for socio-political change.” With his unique wit and ability to see humor in the most dire circumstances, he described his journey to “exile” from Jerusalem to Champagne, Illinois. In Champagne, he teaches Hebrew and is the Clinical Professor of Jewish Culture and Society. In telling this and many other stories, he offers a corrective to the historical understanding of the nature of the apartheid imposed by the Israeli state on Arab Palestinians since the Nakba in the 1940s. He also illustrates how Israeli government policies and patriarchal family structures have diminished the motility of Arabs living in Israel.

 

A full transcript of the lecture is available here.