Social Science Research Council

Producing Knowledge on World Regions: Issues of Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity

New York City, June 14-15, 2007

In June of 2007 the SSRC held a two-day consultation meeting and workshop which was designed to present the findings and outputs thus far from the study of Middle East Studies Centers as well as the expanded study of ME, Russian/Eurasian and South Asian Studies centers, and to solicit responses and input from a select group of social scientists, area specialists, educators, research administrators and donors. This June meeting served both as a platform to disseminate findings from the first study of MES Centers as well as a bridge between the original and expanded project and was co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture & Politics at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Attendees included a number of national and international scholars and area studies specialists as well as a number of current and former Title VI center directors and area studies association presidents and executive directors.

The meeting built upon a panel from the annual 2006 MESA convention focused on Middle East Studies on U.S. campuses. In particular, participants focused on the institutional infrastructures of knowledge production as well as on the impact of these changing structures on the substance of knowledge production on the Middle East.  June’s meeting included all original panel attendees; project staff also commissioned a number of other papers for the purpose of this event, including one specifically on the public and political challenges facing MES after 9/11, one on topical and theoretical trends among the new generation of MES scholars in the U.S. and another on academic freedom and MES. In addition, several of the discussion sessions and panels were devoted to issues of internationalization. One panel examined the production of knowledge about world regions, in particular the Middle East, outside of the U.S. Another reflected on the ways in which knowledge is produced on regions as well as, and in comparison to, within regions and how these different modes of knowledge production inhibit and/or encourage dynamic international collaborative research projects.

Project staff members have begun synthesizing the meeting discussions and materials in order to disseminate this information to a wider audience. Individual paper authors are revising their pieces and will work towards producing both a series of articles which will appear in relevant journals as well as a cohesive edited volume.