Minutes
Informal meeting at the Middle East Studies Association, Annual Meeting, Montreal, November 18, 2007.
We met at the registration desk at 1:00 p.m., as arranged via our
list-serve the previous week, and then wandered through the Palais des
congrès looking for a spot to sit and eat, before settling on a
collection of couches with no food. We numbered about 10 people, a
majority of them graduate students. After introducing ourselves
and our current research projects, we discussed shared concerns,
including the availability of datasets on the Middle East, guidance on
interviewing and other qualitative methodologies, questions of access
in difficult political environments, availability of language training,
lack of teaching materials such as textbooks, lack of communication
with colleagues working on sociology of the region.
Suggestions for the development of Middle East sociology included:
writing a textbook on “Sociology of the Middle East,”
scheduling more panels and informal get-togethers at future ASA and
MESA meetings, sharing drafts of written work with one another, and
including outside members on master’s and dissertation committees.
Minutes taken by Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill