Call for Papers

Generations and Protests: Legacies, Emergences in the MENA region and the Mediterranean

The recent events in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere in the world brought forth the question of youth engagement and the development of new forms of protest. While much have been discussed, the demonstration of the interconnectedness between different protest “moments” in the long term or on a diachronic axis remains extremely thin if not absent. The aim of this collection is to inquire and problematize the relations that exist between different periods of protest, the type of actors they mobilize and the processes of memory they generate.

The articles of this collection will deal with these questions and others in

1. Referring to specific national contexts and narratives.
2. Reconsidering the limits of the present and reassessing the past in youth formations.
3. Analyzing the dynamic between generations and memory formations. 4. Examining the function of media technologies and modes and modalities of communication.
5. Exploring the productions of subjectivities in examining the types of counter-publics produced by different generations.
6. Identifying the correspondences and the complexities between contexts and temporalities.
7. Problematizing place and space and the conditions of emergence of protest mobilizations and contestation.
8. Developing new methodologies and approaches to youth/generation clusters in the MENA and the Mediterranean.
9. Exploring the limits of the concept of generation, particularly the ways in which certain groups framed their struggle as first and foremost between freedom vs. oppression, democracy vs. Totalitarianism, or New Regime vs. Old Regime.

Please send an abstract (minimum 450 words and not to exceed 550 words), a short biography (highlighting research and publications), and contact information by November 4, 2013 to professors Mark Ayyash and Ratiba Hadj-Moussa (mayyash@mtroyal.ca ; rhm@yorku.ca).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by November 20, 2013.

Article submission deadline is May 22, 2014.