ALL CONFERENCE EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus
University of Alberta
April 24-25, 2015
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
(PDF version)

FRIDAY APRIL 24, 2015
11:00am – 1:00pm
Venue: Third Floor, Old Arts Building
Registration (information desk for participants and attendees)

1:00pm-1:30pm
Venue: Third Floor of the Old Arts Building
Digital Presentations will be held in Senate Chamber
Undergraduate Poster Session

1:30pm-03:20 pm
Venue: Senate Chamber, Old Arts Building
Panel 1: Islamophobias, (War on) Terror, and Their Rising Complexities
Chair: Dr. Yasmeen Abu-Laban, University of Alberta

• The Need for De-centering Anti-Islamophobic Critiques: Proposing a Demarcation (Roxana Akhbari – University of Alberta)
• Of Terrorism and Barbarism: Orientalism, Settler Colonialism, and Violence in Discourses of Canadian Citizenship (Azeezah Kanji – University of London)
• Towards an Analytic of Secular Governmentality, Gendered Islamophobia and the Charter of Quebec Values (Roshan Jahangeer – York University)
• ‘I Belong’: Forging Muslim Identities in the Context of Post 9/11 Security Policies (Zeina Sleiman – McMaster University)

1:30pm-03:20 pm
Venue: Room A430, Old Arts Building
Panel 2: The Muslim Other and the Making of the European Subject
Chair: Dr. Joseph Patrouch, University of Alberta

• Bosnian Muslim Subaltern in Modern Europe: From Myth to Genocide (Jasna Balorda – Liverpool Hope University)
• Selling Heritage in the Post-Ottoman Balkans: in but not ‘of ‘Europe (Derek Bryce – University of Strathclyde & Senija Causevic – University of London)
• The Muslim Question, Orientalism and Racial Governmentality:Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of Germany’s Politics of Islam (Zubair Ahmad – Free University Berlin)

3:30pm-5:20 pm
Venue: Senate Chamber, Old Arts Building
Panel 3: Literature and Muslim Subjectivities
Chair:  Dr. Lahoucine Ouzgane, University of Alberta

• Sheherzade Re-Dressed as Persianate: Critical Regionalism and Iranian and Afghan Literary Print Cultures (Rasoul Aliakbari – University of Alberta)
• The Challenges of Critical Pedagogy: Teaching Satrapi’s Persepolis and Undoing Liberal Assumptions (Zeina Tarraf – University of Alberta)
• Towards a Liberating Notion of Islam: A Reading to Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (Fouad Mami – University of Adrar)
• Arab Identity Crisis in the Age of Globalization: Concepts of Democracy,Modernity and Fundamentalism in the Contemporary Arab Novel (Jihan Zakarriya – Cardiff University)

3:30pm-5:20 pm
Venue: Room A430, Old Arts Building
Panel 4: Orientalism and Its Critical Reception
Chair: Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea, University of Alberta

• Unsettling Orientalism: Edward W. Said’s (1978) Book and Its Covers (Katherine Bischoping, Rawan Abdelbaki, Kritee Ahmed, Krista Banasiak, and Duygu Gül-Kaya – York University)
• Gauchos and Oriental Barbarians in Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo (Axel Pérez – University of Alberta)
• Orientalism Redeployed: Art as Cultural Self-critique and Self-representation (Elizabeth Carnegie – University of Sheffield & Derek Bryce – University of Strathclyde)
• Imaging Muslim Women: Oil Politics, Islamophobia and the Neoliberal state
  (Sheena Wilson, Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta)

6:00pm-7:30pm
Venue: Alberta School of Business (BUS), Room 1-09
Opening Keynote Lecture
“A Catastrophically Damaged Gene Pool”: Race, Religion and Culture in the Security Hearing”
Professor Sherene Razack, University of Toronto
To be introduced by Dr. Terri Tomsky, University of Alberta
Q&A session will be moderated by Prof. Jenny R. Kelly, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta

7:30pm-8:30pm
RECEPTION
Venue: Student Lounge (1st floor), Old Arts Building

 

SATURDAY APRIL 25, 2015

8:30am-10:20am
Venue: Senate Chamber, Old Arts Building
Panel 5: Modernities beside Themselves
Chair: Dr. Michael Frishkopf, University of Alberta

• A ‘Failed’ Modernity? Or A ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?A Reading of Amin Maalouf’s The Rock of Tanios (Khalid Alhathlool – Warwick University)
• Queering Islamic Modernities: Middle Eastern Political Art and its Diaspora (Andrew Gayed – Carleton University)
• Modernity and Palestine (Mark Ayyash – Mount Royal University)
• Echos of a Modernity that Might Have Been (Alia O’Brien – University of Toronto)

8:30am-10:20am
Venue: Room A430, Old Arts Building
Panel 6: Politics of Space and Place
Chair: Dr. Jaro Stacul, University of Alberta

• From Protectorate to Neo-Liberal Casablanca – An Overview of Order & Progress (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson – OCAD University)
• Alternative Spaces of Muslim Youth: Experimenting Laïcité within the Multicultural French Mosque (Ayse Ozcan – Syracuse University)
• On Protectorates and Consultanates: The Birth and Demise of Modernization in the Gulf States (Ali Karimi & Frederic Kim – Harvard University)

10:30am-12:20pm
Venue: Senate Chamber, Old Arts Building
Panel 7: Gender Dynamics, Religion, and Cultural Belonging
Chair: Dr. Susanne Luhmann, University of Alberta

• Mediating Islam: Gender, Rights, and New Modern Citizens in Iran (Catherine Sameh – University of California, Irvine)
• Courtesan Bombshell to Terrorist Bomber: Indian Cinematic Representations of the Muslim Woman (Asma Sayed – University of Alberta)
• Rethinking Paradox and Agency: Muslim Women between Creativity and Constraint (Falak Mujtaba – University of Toronto)
• Living Our Counternarratives: Disrupting Single Stories of Muslim Women
  (Zahra Kasamali & Muna Saleh, University of Alberta)

10:30am-12:20pm
Venue: Room A430, Old Arts Building
Panel 8: Historicizing and Contextualizing
Chair: Dr. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta

• Historicizing Islam and Modernity in Senegal: the Sufi Political Theology of Secularism and Democracy (Abubakr Tandia – University of Bayreuth)
• Origins of Identity Confusion: Is the Path Dependency of the Late 19th Century Egypt Still Shaping Its Present Politics? (Ahmed El-sayed, University of Copenhagen)
• Reimagining Mediterranean Spaces: Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912 (Jonathan Mccollum – University of California, Los Angeles)
• Modernizing Reason: Reinventing the City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Qom, Iran (Arun Rasiah – University of California, Berkeley)

12:30pm-1:30pm
LUNCH BREAK

1:30pm-3:20pm
Venue: Senate Chamber, Old Arts Building
Panel 9: Limits of Multiculturalism
Chair: Nisha Nath, University of Alberta

• Issues and Problems of Muslim Children in Canadian Schools (Afshan Amjad – University of Alberta)
• Omar Khadr, Hannah Arendt, and the Racialization of Rights (Valentina Capurri – Ryerson University)
• Competing Secularisms and the Production of the Good Muslim/Post-Muslim (Itrath Syed – Simon Fraser University)
• The Hybrid Identities and the Limits of Multiculturalism: On the Emergence of Western Muslims and the Jurisprudence of Minorities (Abdie Kazemipur – University of Lethbridge)

1:30pm-3:20pm
Venue: Room A430, Old Arts Building
Panel 10: Coloniality and Resistance
Chair: Dr. Mojtaba Mahdavi, University of Alberta

• Alienation and Violence: Frantz Fanon and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Mauro Saccol – Genoa University)
• (Re)inserting Assyrians: Nation and Identity Construction in Post-2003 Iraq (Mariam Georgis – University of Alberta)
• Exclusions of IR: A Postcolonial Framework of International Relations (Riva Gewarges – McMaster University)

4:00pm-5:30pm
Venue: Alberta School of Business (BUS), Room 1-09
Closing Keynote Lecture
Acknowledging Islamic Modernities and Their Engagement with Coloniality
Professor Parin Dossa – Simon Fraser University
To be introduced by Dr. Jaro Stacul, University of Alberta