LAUSR

One of the first ways that many scholars of the Middle East encounter the region is precisely through the lens of “region” itself. Our ability to know the Middle East as a region today, we learn, is a complicated inheritance of imperialism, Orientalism, and Cold War area studies scholarship. To study the Middle East as the “Middle East,” in other words, is to be necessarily positioned within a contested and unequal field of knowledge, one whose contours are both historically and geographically specific. Much of the best research and teaching within Middle East studies continues to demonstrate that knowing about the region—and the world more broadly—is closely entwined with the politics of the region. The interdisciplinary spatial turn within Middle East studies has been and continues to be so fertile precisely because of that reflexivity.