Projects, Initiatives, and Collaborations

The Arab Public Data Initiative is part of the global movement toward open science and knowledge as a public good and aims to promote the norms and practices of data management and data sharing among social scientists and research institutions in the Arab region.

This initiative included mapping and analyzing the landscape of critical humanities in the Arab region, and soliciting essays on different aspects of humanities disciplines and fields, as well as helping to identify the individuals, organizations, institutions, and platforms in the Arab region who are working on the humanities through a critical perspective.

The ACSS has been serving for more than a decade as a core partner in an international, inter-institutional consortium of InterAsia Partners that developed InterAsia as a concept, paradigm, and empirical framework, re-envisioning the Asian expanse as an interconnected geographical formation that transcends conventional academic and geopolitical labels and divisions.

The purpose of the project is to critically scope and evaluate the knowledge that has been produced about women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s and develop an integrative analysis of the findings of that research.

The Ethics in Social Science Research Initiative includes a set of activities and programs including training activities for grantees and fellows, small grants for individuals and institutions in the Arab region, an ethics platform (underway) as well as collaborative projects with other organizations to advance the culture of research ethics in the Arab region.

This project entitled Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa (RMENA) is aimed towards reshaping the landscape of social science research in the Arab world.

This project aimed to build a network of thought leaders, researchers, activists, teachers, students as well as members of communities that advocate for the right to education from the Global South that would ultimately present new paradigms, perspectives and realities emerging from the Global South as well as de-colonial approaches based on diversity, inclusion and equality.

The aim of the project is to create new collections of oral histories that support a feminist multidisciplinary critique of knowledge production practices and research methodologies. It also seeks to create a more inclusive and critical body of new situated knowledge, in, from, and about the region.

What kind of knowledge(s) is now produced on gender and who produces it? How do we make sense of the complex landscape of actors – both academics and activists – and how can we understand the movements between and across several their trajectories? What are the gaps in research? What are the most salient and relevant issues that the ACSS should work on in the area of gender studies? Most importantly, how can we look at gender as a core concept within all these dynamics?

Striking from the Margins (SFM) is a research initiative that explores the profound transformations within the religious, state, and social structures of the Middle East, with a particular focus on Syria and Iraq over the last three decades.

Following our involvement in the 2017 World Humanities Conference in Liege, Belgium, we were honored to participate in the World Humanities Report (WHR), focusing specifically on the Arab Region’s contribution. Throughout 2020 and 2021, we engaged a diverse group of scholars from the region and beyond. Their mission was to explore and provide insight into the various elements that influence the formation and evolution of humanities knowledge within the Arab context.