Seteney Shami
Director General at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences
About Seteney Shami
Dr. Seteney Shami is an anthropologist from Jordan who obtained her B.A. from the American University of Beirut and her M.A. and Ph.D from University of California, Berkeley. After teaching and setting up a graduate dept. of anthropology at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the regional office of the Population Council in Cairo as director of the Middle East Awards in Population and the Social Sciences (MEAwards). In July 1999, she joined the Social Science Research Council in New York as program director for the program on the Middle East and North Africa and also the program on Eurasia (until 2010). She has been a visiting Professor at U.C. Berkeley, Georgetown University, University of Chicago, Stockholm University and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala). Dr. Shami’s fieldwork has focused on Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and the North Caucasus. Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state‐building strategies, and population displacement and trans‐national mobility. Dr. Shami coordinated the steering committee that undertook the background work for the establishment of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and also acted as a (part-time) founding director between January 2010 – April 2012.
A Tribute to Seteney Shami from the ACSS Board of Trustees
Our tenure as members of the 2020-2022 Board of Trustees coincided with the most serious crisis that faced ACSS since its founding in 2010. Lebanon, the home of ACSS, witnessed its most severe economic meltdown and the bankruptcy of its entire banking system. Add to this a massive explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 that destroyed vast areas across the city. The ACSS found itself face-to-face with a shattered landscape, having to steer its way through an almost perfect storm at a time when the whole region continued to be shaken by new waves of Arab protests.
We BoT members witnessed the resilience of the ACSS leadership that held the fort and navigated through the ordeal with calm determination and necessary wisdom. Dr Seteney Shami and her team, together with Dr Mohammed Bamyeh, Chair of the BoT at the time, met the emergencies with inventive solutions and built on the capital of trust they had accumulated over the first ten years of the ACSS. In coordination with ACSS and BoT members, they consolidated the achievements of the first decade and devised ways to plough on toward the second decade despite all the challenges. Given the multiple crises unsettling the region, the need was never bigger to make sense of what was happening and to support efforts through a social scientific understanding of this troubled region.
Today, we want to document this leadership and the excellence of its aggregate qualities that molded ACSS into what it is today and allowed it to carry on despite all adversities. We also want to highlight the different institutional knowledge cultures that Dr. Seteney Shami has experienced throughout her professional and academic career that have in many ways informed the ACSS, its programs and activities.
Here is the story that brought Seteney Shami and the ACSS together. Today, we intend to hold onto this success and carry on despite all the odds.
Sincerely,
The 2020-2022 ACSS Board of Trustees
The ACSS: From Concept to Reality
