In recent years social scientists have been interested in the growth and transformation of global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial…[Read more]

This paper explores how everyday religious narratives in post-disaster contexts can be interpreted as key sites of agency articulated in resistance to dominant discourses of disaster relief. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we argue that religious discourses code everyday actions with…[Read more]

The twentieth-century debate between modernist and postcolonial scholars around the figure of W.B. Yeats should move beyond purely modern or postcolonial frameworks. Yeats’s poems can be read as meditations through which the Irish poet both anticipates the promise of a postcolonial, modern world, and yet remains attached to the lasting structures…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from
other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in
UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise,
the REF.…[Read more]

Over the last 20 years the imbrication between capital and the university has grown much firmer. This
paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic
management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of
profit, value, and growth.…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

This paper paper reviews the concepts of interculturality and internationalization of higher education, discussing the relationship between them and additional languages, drawing on some considerations on the use of an approach for the teaching-learning-use of additional languages, known as the intercomprehension approach. The review offered here…[Read more]

The purpose of this study is to explore in depth the concerns that limit the participation of developing countries in the WTO Dispute Settlement Proceedings. To this end, it investigates the current practice of WTO members. By interviewing Arab specialists, it seeks to understand why Arab developing members are reluctant to use the Dispute…[Read more]

Undotted consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text produced for a students’ exercise. The display is constrained by the limitations of the font and by no means meant to reproduce scribal practices of early Qurʾān manuscripts! Full document available on request (gs50[at]soas.ac.uk).

While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (ḥajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. This chapter introduces one of the most important and yet least-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary r…[Read more]

This article examines how the Persian prison poem (habsiyāt) incorporated Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples into its poetics. By tracing how Khāqāni of Shirvān (d. 1199) brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities (ahl al-zemma), I offer a new perspective on…[Read more]

Mīrzā Fatḥ ‘Alī Ākhūndzāda’s Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern Iranian society. This essay frames Ākhūndzāda’s text within a broader intellectual tradition. I read Ākhūndzāda as a radical reformer whose inte…[Read more]

The United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest
humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected
twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship between nature
and society. The lives of extremely vulnerable groups such as subsistence farmers
and unskilled labourers were…[Read more]

Review of Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, Charand-o Parand. Revolutionary Satire from Iran, 1907–1909, Translated by Janet Afary and John R. Perry, in Iranian Studies

This dissertation traces the emergence of transnational political institutions among Arabophone Ottoman emigrants living in New York City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, and analyzes the development of a long-distance nationalist politics among emigrant activists during and after World War I. Using socially-produced primary materials written and…[Read more]

Argues that the humanities do not need a replication drive like that being pushed for in the sciences.

Acknowledging the central role art from around the globe played in the production of the modern, this seminar will engage with the emergent art historical, methodological, and theoretical literature shaping the history of modern art after the global turn. Particular case studies of regional art movements (in e.g. Cuba, Brazil, India, Japan, Iran,…[Read more]

Artists around the world grappled with the modern, working through local concerns and struggles but continually engaged with counterparts in Europe, North America, and across the “global South.” This course will introduce art, artists, movements, and institutions of modernism from approximately 1880 to the present and from outside of the nor…[Read more]