Report at the DAVO Congress, Berlin from 6. - 8.10.2011
Report on my participation at the DAVO (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient) Congress in Berlin, 6-8.10.2011
From October 6th until the 8th of this year I participated, as a panel organizer and as a discussant, to the 18. International DAVO (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient) Congress, held at the Free University of Berlin in those days. With Dr. Sophie Roche, post-doc fellow of the ZMO (Zentrum Moderner Orient) and a former PhD student at our Graduate School, I organized a panel on "Youth facing Change" (more details below), as part of my attempts at establishing a net of scholars working on topic similar to mines here in Germany, as a core goal of my stay here as a post-doc fellow.
The panel we organized, under the title "Youth facing Change. State policies and Modernity in Central Asia and in the Arab World" was scheduled to be held on the 7th October, from 11 am to 16 pm, and I was planning to present a paper on "Higher Education Reforms and their Impact on the Everyday Lives of Students in Jordan", as a part of the research proposal that I am planning to do during my stay at the Graduate School. I was then asked, by the DAVO organization committee, to make room for another paper presenter in our already full panel, that comprised eight speakers including myself – the DAVO only allows four speakers per time slot. In agreement with Dr. Roche, I decided not to present my paper and to act only as a chair of the sessions and as a discussant on the second panel. Planned speakers included some German or Germany-based scholars, such as Prof. Stephan from the Humboldt University, Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix from ZMO, Liza Franke from Leipzig, Hoda Salah from Frankfurt/Mainz, Homeira Heidary from Berlin, other than more international scholars such as Lars Geiser from Alexandria (Egypt) and Ido Zelkovitz from Haifa University (Israel), in addition to Dr. Sophie Roche.
The publication of some of the interventions to the panel is currently being planned by Dr. Sophie Roche and Dr. Daniele Cantini; this will possibly require the organization of a more specific workshop, to be held in the next semester, in order to collect more contributions.