Call for Papers

Conference Theme

Destruction, Loss, and Recovery in the Middle East

Debris, ruins, rubble, and loss are legacies of imperial power and contemporary capitalist and colonial violence. Communities across the Middle East are routinely forced to confront the threat of looming ruination and loss and to develop strategies to recover and resist continuous onslaughts against ways of life, livelihoods, home-making – and existence itself. Amidst the possibility of myriad irrevocable injuries – and, of course, the fully realised potential of destruction in Palestine and Lebanon – the question of recovery is vital. Responding to the threat and realisations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of collective violence in the region, BRISMES 2025 will engage ways of documenting, analysing and examining destruction, loss, and recovery in the Middle East. From Egypt to Iran, Lebanon to Yemen, Palestine to Kurdistan, different groups, peoples and nations are variously targeted, dispossessed, and steadfast; we are therefore also asking how that which is destroyed – lands, homes, cultures – is actively recovered. We encourage submissions that spotlight the ways artists, activists, and students keep alive the prospects of recovery, imagining and enacting prospects of liberation from the capitalist and colonial forces that threaten ways of living. If we learn anything from the often-terrifying news cycle, it is that even with so much destruction, the potential for more is always looming; as are alternative futures of loss and/or recovery.   

How do we define and defy loss and ruination as social, political, military and juridical phenomena? How do collectives and individuals deal with the potentiality and reality of loss? How do we imagine a future beyond the constant cycle of loss and recovery? How does one navigate, resist, and refuse ruination? What meaning does “recovery” have in such a world? How can such a cycle be broken, imaginatively and materially? How do certain sites and populations continue and thrive, seemingly insulated from such threat and the need for recovery? 

These questions are only a beginning; destruction, loss, and recovery are three key themes with high conceptual and political stakes. We invite conversations that attempt to respond to these stakes and shape new ways of thinking about them (and beyond). Below is a list of potential themes for submissions to the conference, but they are in no way an exhaustive list. 

•  Rethinking what constitutes ruins and ruination across time and space, in the Middle East; 

• The variegated experiences of war and violence and their impacts at local, communal, national and regional scales;  

• Economic and social strategies of endurance, survival, resistance, care and rehabilitation;  

• Imaginaries of recovery and liberation;

• Queer approaches to resistance and refusal; 

• The relationship between war-making and historical/emerging forms of (un)state-making and the expansion of martial and racial politics, at local, national and regional levels;  

• Connecting past and present through cultural archives of oppression and resistance; 

• The afterlives of debris and loss;  

• Art as resistance; 

• Past and present forms of genocidal violence;  

• Ruination, war-making and the politics of climate breakdown in the region;  

• Literary, dramatic, and other artistic responses to war and ruination;   

• Translating a lexicon of oppression and liberation.