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The Middle East without Space?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Timur Hammond
Timur Hammond*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vt.; e-mail: timur.hammond@uvm.edu
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Extract

One of the first ways that many scholars of the Middle East encounter the region is precisely through the lens of “region” itself. Our ability to know the Middle East as a region today, we learn, is a complicated inheritance of imperialism, Orientalism, and Cold War area studies scholarship. To study the Middle East as the “Middle East,” in other words, is to be necessarily positioned within a contested and unequal field of knowledge, one whose contours are both historically and geographically specific. Much of the best research and teaching within Middle East studies continues to demonstrate that knowing about the region—and the world more broadly—is closely entwined with the politics of the region. The interdisciplinary spatial turn within Middle East studies has been and continues to be so fertile precisely because of that reflexivity.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 319 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 See Mitchell, Timothy, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. Szanton, David L. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004), 74–118 Google Scholar.

2 Mills, Amy and Hammond, Timur, “The Interdisciplinary Spatial Turn and the Discipline of Geography in Middle East Studies,” in Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge, ed. Shami, Seteney and Miller-Idriss, Cynthia (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 152 Google Scholar–88.

3 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar.

4 Curry, Michael, “Toward a Geography of a World without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2005): 680 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Curry, Michael, The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the Written Word (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar. See also Pierce, Joseph, Martin, Deborah G., and Murphy, James T., “Relational Place-Making: The Networked Politics of Place,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 (2010): 54–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Massey, Doreen, Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time (Heidelberg, Germany: University of Heidelberg, 1999)Google Scholar, 22.

7 Latour, Bruno, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications," Soziale Welt 47 (1996): 371 Google Scholar–72.

8 Hart, Kimberly, And Then We Work for God: Rural Islam in Western Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), 7 Google Scholar.

9 On Barak, , On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2015), 7 Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 21.

11 Turam, Berna, Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 3. Her theorization of the spatiality of freedom draws on a range of scholars, but this particular formulation specifically cites the work of Saskia Sassen and Edward Soja.