THE
MIT ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR MIDDLE EAST STUDIES
(MIT-EJMES)
web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
CALL FOR
PAPERS
LIVING TRAUMAS: PREDICAMENTS OF
[POST]-DISASTER RECONSTRUCTION
The MIT Electronic Journal
for Middle East Studies (MIT-EJMES) is seeking papers addressing questions of post-war, post conflict reconstruction in
urban settings. The connection between cities and disaster is fast becoming
a prolific theme in development and planning discourse today. Whether in a war
context like Iraq or Palestine today,
a post civil war context like Lebanon or Bosnia or in the aftermath of
terror attacks like New York, Casablanca or Madrid the work of imagination,
planning, and intervention tries to confront the particular vulnerabilities
that rip through each of these cities. This process, generally labeled as one
of reconstruction, impacts and reshapes the relationship between urban
forms, market economies, collective memories, communal identities and political
programs and is in turn reshaped by them.
This special issue of
MIT-EJMES is the
first in a newly established bi annual
series that will explore the constitution of the urban and architectural
whilst interrogating various development agendas in the region. The Living Traumas issue aims to examine the
theoretical and practical discourse around post-war reconstruction and
development from a comparative perspective with a special focus on the Middle
East, Africa and Asia. Some of the
questions that we would like to raise include themes such as what idea of the
city is implicit in reconstruction? Can a post-war/post disaster situation be a
source for a new interpretative framework of city making and urban life? Do
some cities have a predilection for internal disasters? What is the role of
memory and agency in post-war/disaster reconstruction? Have changes in the
scale of domestic disasters such as the September 11th attacks in
New York transformed our understandings of the city and our concepts of
reconstruction?
This issue will be focused
on two specific themes:
RECONSTRUCTION AND
DEVELOPMENT
The management of war and
post war contexts is often geared towards the continuation or resumption of
normal life. Seldom do we ask, what does it mean for social life to continue or
resume and how do we identify these resumptions? What notions of temporality
are involved in this before and after? What does it mean to try to build the
city “as it really was” as happened in post WWII Warsaw and what kind of ideas
are reflected in these initiatives? How does the intersection between the
violence of development and the violence of war reconstitute urban lives and
fabrics? What cultures of planning undergrid post-disaster building? Who are
the stakeholders involved in this process and what are the ideas informing
various approaches to reconstruction programs as in Iraq and Sudan today for
example?
RECONSTRUCTION AND
IDENTITY
In a post war context,
the city has to be thought anew- what is important in this process is who
thinks? Who acts? Who still speaks for whom? However this thinking process also
has to consider the intangible aspects of living in a city, that is the ways in
which the city is constituted through the memories of its inhabitants and the
role of those memories in asserting diverse rights to the city both material
and ephemeral. In other words, when does reconstruction imply forgetfulness
with respect to the disaster that befell it or, alternatively, its absorption
into the imaginary of the city either physically or through fiction and film? In
the process what is the impact of large scale urban development projects
undertaken in the name of reconstruction on the reconfiguration of cities and
identities?
DEADLINES
Please Send a 300-500
word abstract by
June 25, 2005
to
Maha Yahya
Paniyota Pyla
If selected final papers
will be due by
October 15, 2005
For further queries
please write to the e-mails above.