The conference included a keynote delivered by Syrian writer Yassin Al Haj Saleh, titled “The Undeniable and the Unbelievable: Ideology and the Trinity of the Exceptional, the Impossible and the Horrible”. The session was moderated by Mohammed Bamyeh (Former ACSS BoT Chair) and Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (Current ACSS BoT Chair). The Conference also featured a plenary on “Theorizing from the South: Transregional Perspectives” which included Godwin Murunga (Executive Secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa/CODESRIA), Karina Batthyány (Executive Director of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences/CLACSO), Driss Ksikes (HEM – LCI Morocco, and member of the Conference Organizing Committee) and Fadi Bardawil (Duke University, also member of the conference organizing committee). The conference concluded with a closing session of the ACSS Annual Lecture Series honoring late Moroccan writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi, during which the three lecturers of the series, Asmae Benadada (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fes, Morocco), Omaima Abou-Bakr (Cairo University) and Zeina Zaatari (Arab American Center for Culture and Arts, University of Illinois, Chicago) presented summaries of their main lectures. The conference also included other activities, such as poster sessions by the ACSS New Generation of Social Scientists Program fellows, workshops, book exhibits, archives of prestigious Arab periodicals by “Alfurat for Publishing & Distributing”, “Meet the Author” sessions featuring Pascale Ghazaleh’s book “Journey in Search of May”, Ali Abdellatif Hamida’s book “The Libya we Don’t Know”, Zahra Ali’s book “Women and Gender in Iraq” and Abdel Ahad Sebti’s book “From the Year of the Elephant to the Year of the Americans: Oral Memory and Historiography”. The conference also featured a booth devoted to the ACSS publications that are free and open access for all and constitute important knowledge resources for researchers. Papers presented at the conference were organized around the following four main themes:

Dismantling colonial and authoritarian epistemological structures has taken different forms over the last four decades. Although they have mostly emanated from different schools in Western universities, they have taken different local dimensions in India, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Each context has its premises as well as its epistemological and historical starting points for questioning the sediments and residues of colonial knowledge structures in the present. This includes ways of formulating, structuring and receiving academic knowledge, the relationship between academic elites and their societies, and also the institutionalization of technical modernity initiated by post-independence states, which is characterized by the importation of “experts” with their ready-made approaches to address societal problems at a time when these societies are still searching for intellectual and procedural independence.  Interrogating patterns of colonial thinking in the Arab region was not born today; it has been in existence from the sixties to the eighties of last century and has acquired different colorations depending on local cultures and development as well as ongoing attempts to question authenticity. The latter has sometimes adopted fundamentalist dimensions.While these approaches and methods have not been subsumed under overarching names or titles directly related to the post-colonial, they still managed to give rise to a large corpus of knowledge that requires insightful and careful reading. It is also important to remember that the need to dismantle colonial epistemologies did not come from nowhere. It has been addressed in the last years by academics who have been somewhat liberated from hegemonic ways of thinking, artists who questioned dominant and implicit heritage in their societies as well as researchers in the diaspora who face new manifestations of control and dispossession and seek to research and revisit these areas and open them for critique.

Popular culture is an important arena through which knowledge is produced and practiced and through which social life is critiqued and transformed. Popular culture can be seen as the expression of peoples’ values and everyday life, but it can also be imposed by a privileged political group or elite. From these perspectives, popular culture is part of everyday life and at the same time a site of struggle and an arena for the display of power and control. Memory is an integral part of the construction of popular culture as it shapes how people or groups of people remember their past and explain their present.  In this way, memory becomes one way of recognizing a shared past and formulating an identity that may provide support and social solidarity or justify or prolong conflict and social divisions. Memories form narratives: local, national and transregional about why things happen the way they do and how problems can be dealt with. Memories are, in most cases, related to a turbulent past and such turbulent pasts are used to procure but also to question prevailing understandings of identity and solidarity. The construction and reproduction of peoples’ relationship to the past is in this way entangled with popular culture. It is important to understand that both memory and popular culture do not emerge ‘naturally’ even though they seem ‘organic’ to a community or a society. They are produced through formal and informal institutions and practices and are also a site for state intervention. In today’s world, memory and popular culture are shaped and managed through education, traditional media and social media and through events, commemorations, festivals and websites. Competing narratives provide alternative understandings of the past and constitute an important mode of critiquing and changing present conditions.