The American Political Science Association (APSA) is pleased to announce a call for applications from individuals who would like to participate in a summer workshop series that seeks to explain cross national variations in challenges to old regimes during the early stages of the Arab Spring Movements. The first one-week workshop will be hosted by Birzeit University and the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), from May 11-16, 2014, at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman. A follow-up workshop will be held at Lebanese American University in Beirut in September 2014. The organizers, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will cover all the costs of participation for up to 24 qualified applicants. The workshop will be conducted in English.
The deadline for applications is March 14, 2014. Program information and application instructions can be found online at www.apsanet.org/menaworkshops.
The workshop is targeted at Ph.D. students and early career faculty. While the program primarily caters to political scientists, it is also open to scholars from any social science discipline undertaking research relevant to the workshop theme. By bringing together up to 20 scholars from the MENA region, as well as four advanced PhD students from US and European universities, the program aims to support political science research and teaching in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, and strengthen research networks linking US scholars with their colleagues overseas. The 2014 workshops will be the second series in APSA’s annual MENA Workshops program. The first MENA Workshop was held in February, 2014 at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
The 2014 workshops will be led by Denise DeGarmo (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, USA), Lourdes Habash (Birzeit University, Palestine), Fred H. Lawson (Mills College, USA), and Ghada alMadbouh (Birzeit University/PARC, Palestine). Participants will explore the dynamics of regime change, using the case studies of the Arab Spring as a topical empirical basis for this exploration. The goal of this program is to engage participants in proposing innovative research questions and deploying non-standard methodologies to enhance their studies of the Arab Spring and its implications concerning regime change.
