المنتدى

L’université d’Oran La Faculté des Sciences de la Terre, de Géographie et d’Aménagement du Territoire Le Département de Géographie et d’Aménagement du Territoire et le Laboratoire EGEAT vous invite aux Cinquièmes Journées Géographiques Algériennes - 10 et 11 December 2014

Misbehaving States and Behaving Citizens? Questions of Governance in African States 26-27 September 2014, Uppsala, Sweden

Columbia University's Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life announces the publication of the first book in its Arabic translation series: Democracies in Danger by Dr. Alfred Stepan. The articles in this book discuss areas of great difficulty in many democratic transitions: ethnonational conflicts, domestic security and the role of police and military, and power sharing in presidential and semi-presidential systems.

The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Research Associate.

Andrew Carnegie Centennial Fellowship: in Support of Visiting Scholars in the Social Sciences from Arab Universities

The Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies (BCARS), founded through a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant to the Middle East Center at Northeastern University, invites applications from scholars of the Arab region to serve as a Visiting Scholar in the Consortium.

The 14th conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from December 14-17, 2014. The theme of the conference is “Whose Tradition?”

Scholarships are available for qualified Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese applicants for selected taught Masters degrees in the UK, starting in September 2014. The scholarships are funded by the Asfari Foundation. Each scholarship includes tuition fees and a stipend to cover accommodation and living costs. If necessary, the cost of travel to the UK will also be covered. The scholarship will be tenable for one academic year.

Throughout 2013 António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, seemed to be running out of ways to sound the alarm and describe the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis. “Syria as a civilization is unraveling,” he declared in early June. Later that month he stated that it was the worst catastrophe since the end of the Cold War. The numbers bear out his claims. By the end of 2013 there were over 2 million registered refugees, several million others internally displaced, and estimates of 10 million in desperate need of food and shelter, out of a total population of around 23 million. An estimated 100,000 have been killed by the fighting and many more wounded and disappeared.

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences was one of the initial colleges that constituted the United Arab Emirates University when it began operation in 1977. Over time it has expanded in the range of its programs, in student registrations, and in faculty and staff members. Today, the College has about 150 faculty members and 38 staff members. It is organized in twelve academic departments. For planning and operational purposes, the departments are gathered in two divisions—the Social Sciences, and the Humanities—each led by an Associate Dean who reports to the Dean. The College offers seventeen undergraduate programs, a growing number of Masters programs, and a PhD program in all fields where there is sufficient academic strength.

The Department of Humanities is the largest in CAS, with over 370 students and 30 full-time faculty members. With its vision of becoming one of the leading departments in the region, the Department of Humanities is committed to achieving academic excellence in teaching and scholarly endeavors, as well as serving the academic community and the public at large. The department currently offers a major in History, and a minor in Geography and Urban Planning for History and Sociology students. In addition, the department offers several elective courses in History, Geography and Philosophy.

In any American university, what the six researchers in this room are doing would be totally unremarkable: launching a new project to use the tools of social science to solve urgent problems in their home countries. But for the young Arab Council for the Social Sciences, this work is anything but routine. The group’s fall meeting, initially planned for Cairo, was canceled at the last minute when Egyptian state security agents demanded a list of participants and research questions. The group relocated its meeting to Beirut, meaning some researchers couldn’t come because of visa problems. Still others feared traveling to Lebanon during a week when the United States was considering air strikes against neighboring Syria. Ultimately, the team met in an out-of-the-way hotel, with one participant joining via Skype.