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Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, ar...

The book celebrates the diversity of beautiful women and explores why men desire women of particular skin colours and ethnic backgrounds. This book also includes a number of African and Arab proverbs.

A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey. “Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and...

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a for...

Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA)-American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity. The collec...

This book focuses on the Kurdish women of Turkey and the ongoing evolution of their role in defining and mobilizing the Kurdish quest for recognition as a people within and against the Republic of Turkey.

This book examines domestic and regional geopolitical dynamics behind Turkish-Qatari relations from the past to the present. Utilizing arguments of practical geopolitical reasoning, OEzgur Pala and Khaled Al-Jaber situate their analysis of evolving relations in the contexts of Ottoman-British geopolitical rivalry in the Persian Gulf, the Turkish Republic's fluctuating relations with the Middle East until the 2000s, the AKP governments' opening to the region and finally the Arab Spring and its af...

The practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the Middle East is explored in this volume, through a unique compilation of data and perspectives from authors living and working in the region. The authors demonstrate how the long-entrenched traditions of philanthropy and generosity in Arab culture have been reinvigorated in recent years and are starting to cross-fertilize with new and more institutionalized forms of giving, advocated through advances pertaining to CSR. Using a variety...

Migration from Central Asia analyzes migration from Turkestan to Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United States and the identity formation of these people living in different countries. It also deals with younger generations and their views about homeland, sense of belonging, and identity. Using oral history methods, the book focuses on migrants from Turkestan in the 1930s. The book includes in-depth interviews as well as short surveys with those who migrated and their children. Focusing on what...

With the creation of the modern nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa, women have been and continue to be manipulated to represent a cultural ideal of perfect womanhood. This is often greatly at odds with the realities of women's lives and aspirations. However, individual women, through careful manipulation of gender relations, often succeed in casting aside the culturally accepted bonds which diminish their lives.Even so, women in groups are deemed unacceptable unless they conform to...

Contextuality of Healthcare Choices in Pakistan analyzes the contextual factors shaping healthcare decision-making in Pakistan. Divided into three thematic areas—contextuality of healthcare choices, power dynamics and the health of the marginalized, and emerging challenges and healthcare response—the book explores the complex interplay of social, cultural, and institutional influences on health-seeking behaviors. The book examines the nuanced fabric of healthcare decision-making in Pakistan thr...

As the 1998 annual World Bank assessment soberly observed: "No country in recent history, let alone one the size of Indonesia, has ever suffered such a dramatic reversal of fortune." Since the middle of 1997, we have witnessed momentous and tragic events in Indonesia. Nobody foresaw the events, and many ordinary Indonesians have experienced a substantial decline in their living standards. This book describes and analyzes Indonesia s most serious economic crisis against the general backdrop of ec...

This text consists of articles from Israeli academics familiar with the Russian, Ethiopian and Bedouin people of the Negev. The editors have organized the work to juxtapose the contributions in a way that will generate comparative insights that exclusive volumes on any one group of people would not achieve. The book is a "photo-documentation" and includes approximately 100 colour and black and white photographs by Ron Kelley, a noted professional photographer. The documentation of people in soci...

Set against the backdrop of the early American presence in Iran under the Shah, and the burgeoning years of Kuwait's early oil boom, Dancing into the Light is Kathryn Abdul-Baki's memoir of growing up within both the expatriate Western communities and the larger Middle Eastern society of Kuwait and Jerusalem. Hers is a story of belonging to two vastly different cultures and finding her place within both, and the search to find the inherent harmony in worlds at odds with each other. She is alread...

Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The authors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Chapters reflect on community politics and activism, migration, orientalism, and critical race theory. Among its unique contributions, the volume provides a fresh look at Canada’s foreign policy as infor...

"I feel I am the wandering Jew who has no place to which she belongs. I thought I could settle down, but can't imagine staying. Whenever I bought a bar of soap and two came in the package, I thought there would be no need to buy a package of two because I would never last through the second. Why? Because I knew I was returning to Iran tomorrow. So too, I would buy the smallest size toothpastes and jars of oil. Putting down roots here is an impossibility." These are the words of one Iranian emigr...

The Living Inca Town presents a rich case study of tourism in Ollantaytambo, a rapidly developing destination in the southern Peruvian Andes and the starting point for many popular treks to Machu Picchu. Tourism is generally welcomed in Ollantaytambo, as it provides a steady stream of work for local businesses, particularly those run by women. However, the obvious material inequalities between locals and tourists affect many interactions and have contributed to conflict and aggression throughout...

Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for...

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people...

During the past seven decades, Palestine has been sealed from the Arab world and shattered into fragmented and coded areas: 1948 area, 1967 area, Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza, and A, B and C areas within the West Bank. Each area is ruled by different laws, including different roads and permits that control the mobility of Palestinians and privilege Jewish settlers. Driving in Palestine is a research-creation project by acclaimed artist Rehab Nazzal, who explores the visible indices of the politic...

This book shows which historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as 'minorities'. Why, in the years around 1920, did the concept of 'minority' suddenly become prominent in public affairs worldwide? Within a decade of World War One, the term became fundamental to public understandings of national and international politics, law, and society. Minorities (and majorities too) were taken to be an objective reality, both in the present and the past. Benjamin White use...

This book covers Mai Masri’s three decades documenting iconic moments of Palestinian and Lebanese linked history. Her films, unique for giving agency to her subjects, tell much about the untold, unseen people, namely women and children, who lived these experiences of war and occupation. Former Lebanese political prisoner Soha Bechara praised her feature film 3000 Nights as “the ‘Lest we forget’ of Palestine." Her focus on the social and political climates of the vivid lives of unseen people conn...

Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Nayra Atiya gathered the oral histories of five Egyptian men: a fisherman, an attorney, a scholar, a businessman, and a production manager. Through personal interviews over the course of several years, Atiya intimately captured the everyday triumphs and struggles of these young men in a rapidly changing Egyptian society. These tender stories of childhood experiences in the rural countryside, of the rigors of schooling, and of the many challenges in nav...