A roundtable of New Scholarly Practices, Broader Career Paths in Near & Middle Eastern Studies, featuring Ziad Abu Rish and Zeyno Üstün.

This roundtable examines the value of public scholarship and work that speaks to broad publics beyond academia. Traditionally, academia has left this role, if it is taken up at all, to scholars late in their careers. In this roundtable, Ziad Abu Rish and Zeyno Üstün discuss their own experiences of public scholarship early in their academic careers. We highlight the ways that graduate students can contribute to public debates and discussions without departing from their academic work, and how this work can contribute to their career advancement.

Ziad Abu Rish is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East & North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He is co-editor of the online news platform Jadaliyya and a member of Quilting Point film collective, which produced the documentaries About Baghdad, What Is Said About Arabs and Terrorism, and The “Other” Threat. Abu Rish is particularly interested in the discursive and material production of a national economy as a sphere of action as well as a site of mundane and institutional struggle. He is preparing a book entitled “Making the Economy, Producing the State: Conflict and Institution Building in Early Independence Lebanon, 1943-1955.”

Zeyno Üstün is a PhD student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, an editor of Public Seminar, a university-based intellectual common, and a founder and researcher at Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for making, analyzing, and publishing network maps. Üstün is working on her dissertation on the strategic use of digital technologies in contemporary social movements. She is specifically focused on the simultaneous revolts of Brazil and Turkey that erupted in June 2013, which coincided with Edward Snowden’s revelations of the unlawful interceptions carried by the US National Security Agency. Her most recent work with Graph Commons includes Networks of Dispossession, a networked database on the relations of capital and power within urbantransformation in Turkey, and Monovacation, a project on thehomogenized nature of global tourism.