The University & Middle East Studies: Tensions Between Critical Inquiry & Institutional Imperatives

Second Author's Department

Political Science Department

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https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02138

All Authors

Lisa Anderson Rabab El-Mahdi Seteney Shami

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Daedalus

Publication Date

5-1-2025

doi

10.1162/daed_a_02138

Abstract

To illuminate the context within which the rest of the contributions of this volume are located, we provide a historical perspective on the development of “Middle East studies” in the modern university. Arguing that this history reflects both the varied and rarely congruent political contexts and the converging institutional evolution of universities globally, we examine how the study of the Middle East and North Africa illustrates an uneasy tension in simultaneously fostering critical inquiry, producing educated elites, serving national interests, meeting international markets, and producing truly global knowledge. These different aims of the university not only exist in tension but might, under certain conditions, become actual contradictions. We may be experiencing such a moment of contradiction at the present time, both in the United States and in the Middle East and North Africa itself.

First Page

16

Last Page

29

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