Conflict, Memory, and Knowledge

Free 14-Week Online Seminar

 Hosted Online – Register Here

Every Tuesday, April 16 – July 16, 2024
2:00 – 3:30 PM CET

Co-Sponsored by Off University and Freie Universität Berlin’s Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East Master’s Program.

Course Description

This course proposes an inquiry into the academic and cultural experiences of writing and re-writing history in Palestine and Syria. It combines different approaches and intellectual schools and will span topics from the epistemic question of the “decolonizing” of knowledge, to the impact of today’s information revolution as a fact of cultural production and political representations.

The seminar emphasizes cross-disciplinary discussions related to the nature of both conflicts and their respective features. The contribution to national self-building will be explored through the lens of statelessness in the Palestinian case and the one-party State and subsequent civil war in the Syrian case. Participants will explore an original combination of dissent and subaltern literature, questioning the philosophical concept of civil society, as well as the legal and political definition of the State. The seminar will track evolutions and mechanisms of knowledge production in contexts of “exile”, “estrangement”, and “conflictual narratives”, as it explores alternative forms of expression and representations within visual arts, popular culture, and thriving personal and oral history accounts.

Sessions will be presented and discussed by both instructors with attention to students’ participation and the co-built and interactive progress of the course. Seminar sessions will include watching and discussing visual materials: visual arts, reviews of films and literature, documentary material, as well as experimental and class interaction experiences with OpenAI – ChatGPT.

Seminar Co-Leaders

More Information

Off University creates new strategies to uphold and sustain academic life and knowledge threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. It was established for and by academics from Turkey yet addresses itself to academics all over the world: academics who have been purged from their institutions, forced to resign, who are legally and politically persecuted, and even imprisoned because of their opinion and research.

Located in Germany, Off-University offers researchers and students with limited opportunity to move around freely an occasion to participate in online education. Off-University combines the good old ideal of academic freedom with state-of-the-art digital communication and collaboration opportunities. Off-University’s mission is based on its commitment to peace in the world and to living together in diversity. It therefore seeks to develop emancipatory education-research activities that are less hierarchial and more democratic.

The Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME) Master’s Program at Freie Universität Berlin is a two-year, tuition-free, full-time master’s program taught in English on the campus in Berlin.

Freie Universität’s expertise in cultural studies of the Middle East – represented by Arabic Studies, Iranian Studies, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Kurdish Studies, Ottoman Studies, Semitic Studies, and Turcology – comes together for this master’s program to offer students the possibility to approach this fascinating and complex region from multi-faceted and interregional perspectives taking into account the diversity of languages, literatures, societies, religions, and cultures of this region.

Schedule, Syllabus, and Readings