Urban Violence: The Middle East

Catalog description

This course explores actors, narratives, experiences, and historical processes that have combined to produce violent cities and societies in the last century. Using the modern and contemporary Middle East as a case study, it addresses a number of salient questions arising from the relentless global advance of sprawling urbanization, conflict, and social inequality. How can we interpret the increasingly close relationship between violence and the city in the 20th and 21st centuries? Can understanding past histories of violence open up new areas of urban activism and public engagement? Can we study, debate, and represent urban violence without offending its past and present victims? Aiming to territorialize and historicize the "urban" as an analytical category, the course scrutinizes the role of cities as frameworks for ordering knowledge, experience, power, inequality, suffering, and civility in the modern world.