PARTICIPANT: "Gamification: Virtual & Augmented Reality in Research and Scholarship Workshop." Harvard University

Participant: "Gamification and Virtual & Augmented Reality in Research and Scholarship Workshop." Harvard University Jan 20-22, 2017

I'm particularly interested in exploring the techniques/technologies of "Gamification" for how it might enter the classroom. I've developed a course over the last year, Digital Methodologies, that presents new approaches to research design pre-fieldwork, and I hope to specifically explore how to integrate ways of thinking/making from this workshop into this course.

Workshop led by Johanna Pirker of the University of Graz. The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the basic principles of using gamification and immersive environments. Participants will learn game design and engagement theory and explore how these methods can be integrated into research, circulation of knowledge, and teaching. The workshop will look at how game engines can be used to create 3D-visualizations and augmented and virtual experiences without the need of programming skills. Students will work together in small groups to learn how to create first and simple playful experiences, 3D-models, visualizations and augmented and virtual applications. 

INVITED TALK: ​ "Historical Views of Tourism in Lebanon: From Metadata to Interface, A View from the View." UC Berkeley

Invited Talk: HISTORICAL VIEWS OF TOURISM IN LEBANON: From Metadata to Interface, A View from the View. The Tourism Studies Working Group and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley. Dec 2016.

This presentation presents a digital platform built around historical visions of tourism in Lebanon. The database was built from a private collection and motivated by larger research questions in my dissertation of sensuality, imagination, and conceptions of place from a 70-year period of physical-mobility-for-pleasure in Lebanon. This talk encompasses the conceptualization, building, and pitfalls of producing a Digital Humanities project parallel to traditional research. How does materiality come to play? What meaningful categories of metadata emerged for inclusion in a database? What is gained and lost in building a database for public distribution, especially around issues of memory and nostalgia? How does an interactive database/project elicit end user experiences through computational processes which is beyond the scope of our writing?

PAPER: "Of Cars, Bridges, Rivers, and Borders: Syrian (Kurdish) Men in Naba’a." Middle East Studies Association.

Paper: "Of Cars, Bridges, Rivers, and Borders: Syrian (Kurdish) Men in Naba’a." Panel: Cities & Histories at the Periphery: Borj Hammoud of Greater Beirut, 1970 - 2016. Middle Eastern Studies Association. Boston, Nov 2016.

This paper explores the neighborhood of Naba’a ethnographically through Syrian male migrant men, focusing on 2008-2013. The analysis centers on how this district became known as a Syrian/Kurdish/migrant neighborhood through notions of place making, and the strategies and tactics used by these men in the larger area of Borj Hammoud before the Syrian Crisis. 

Given that Naba’a was one node for receiving Beirut’s continual Syrian labor, part of this analysis centers on their living situations. Of particular interest are the networks through which they procured housing, as well as the processes of negotiation rent, and dealing with landlords in a neighborhood that is imbricated in the context of Lebanese sectarian politics. Also central to this inquiry were how/when/where these men were mobile in the larger municipality - especially during a time of sporadic events of street fights/violence (most often between (Syrian) Kurds & (Lebanese) Armenian). What ensued were increasing security: bike police patrols to coordinated sweeps “under the bridge,” an emergent border that divided the neighborhood in the late 90s, to coordinated army sweeps in the streets of Naba’a at night.

Many of these men were newer immigrants since 2000, due to an intensifying drought in NE Syria. Thus, it was not just the larger threat of the Syrian male body (common in Lebanon), but also the category of the “Kurd” that emerged in the larger Borj Hammoud municipality. How Kurdish men understood their own identity during this time becomes linked to an analysis of this neighborhood where a huge population of them found footing, community, and entry to Beirut. This analysis also considers the specificity of this location, a neighborhood part of Borj Hammoud, but in many ways bounded by the confines of a bridge, a freeway, and the wall of a river.

PANEL:
Cities & Histories at the Periphery: Borj Hammoud of Greater Beirut, 1970 - 2016

This panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who will present historical and ethnographic work on Borj Hammoud, a working class suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. From the histories of sect-affiliated service provision and its impact on shaping ideas of sectarian identity and belonging; to the material, social and political connections between urban processes in Borj Hammoud and Beirut's southern suburbs; to the role of the 1958 civil conflict in reshaping political geographies in Beirut's eastern sector, to the politics of informality; and the role of mobile, expendable bodies, most often male, in maintaining failing infrastructures in often unexpected ways - this panel reveals the ways in which Borj Hammoud's human and material infrastructures are deeply enmeshed in wide ranging transnational movements and circulations and economic, social and political processes in Lebanon and beyond. Despite its longstanding status as an urban hub for rural and transnational migration, Borj Hammoud remains peripheral to urban studies of the greater Beirut region. Various waves of migration and displacement, from Armenian refugees of the Ottoman era genocide, to Palestinians after 1948, Shi'a from the south of Lebanon in the 1950s, and subsequent and continual movements of Syrian, Kurdish and other migrant workers, have frequently transformed the character of this highly diverse, densely populated commercial and residential district. The papers in this panel seek to explore the ways in which the histories and contemporary conditions of life in this suburb reveals frequently overlooked yet critically important political, social and economic histories of Lebanon today. In all four papers and discussion, scholars on this panel take up the materialities of place and space in the making and unmaking of broader political and social processes in Lebanon today, showing how this apparently "peripheral" space and the peripheralization of suburbs more generally, are highly productive of political and social inequalities, processes and movements in the Lebanese state, the region, and internationally. As is often the case, the periphery is not far from the center.
 

ABSTRACTS:
Narrating Beirut from its Peripheries: A View from Nab‘ah/Bourj Hammoud (1950-1975) by Fawaz, Mona

Of Cars, Bridges, Rivers, and Borders: Syrian (Kurdish) men in Naba’a by McCormick, Jared

The 1958 (Armenian) Civil War in Beirut by Nalbantian, Tsolin

The End(s) of Informality in Borj Hammoud by Nucho, Joanne

 

PAPER: "Meteorology of Affect: Tourism, Hospitality, and Infrastructures of Pleasure in Lebanon." NYU

"Meteorology of Affect: Tourism, Hospitality, and Infrastructures of Pleasure in Lebanon."  Working Group: Infrastructure in/of the Middle East, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. May 2016.

This paper is centered on the growth of Beirut’s Hotel District (Minet Al Hussein, Zeitouna, Ayn al Mressei), which was marked by a hopscotching of infrastructural developments realized through sites of commercialized hospitality in various eras. There are three steps in the above postcard from 1976: The Holiday Inn is prominently foregrounded; facing it are the two towers of the then 15-year-old Phoenicia Hotel; and at sea’s edge, the Saint George Hotel from 1932. These three structures, like stepping stones of greater height, offerings of pleasures, and circulations of bodies, map over periods in the development of Beirut: the French Mandate (1923), after Lebanese Independence (1946), and the start of the Lebanese Civil War (1975). This paper explores aspects of each hotel, a stone’s throw away in distance, but decades apart in time. I argue that these hotels were where hopes and expectations were housed in real concrete infrastructures, but supported through vicarious beams built through tourism. As Harman notes of a bomb: “corrosive chemicals lie side by side” and “something must happen on the sensual plane to allow them to make contact” (2013: 197). In connecting two objects, “separated by a thin film eaten away over time, or ruptured by distance signals” an ensuing reaction results in something new beyond the two (ibid). How then were hotels vicarious mediators in this one area, between guests and the urban landscape? Between multiple visions of Lebanon’s future?

The larger argument at hand here skips through 100 years to aggregate how hospitality was beholden to tourism. A contribution through this work is to consider that which supersedes one era - one lifetime. I am drawn to explore these hotels as infrastructures that developed beyond the human “life cycle” that illustrates continuities, pressures, and progressions of commercialized hospitality (see Bowker 2015). Thinking historically, each hotel in this area “accreted” into the next, they connected to, and built off of previous versions and iterations as tourism advanced (Anand 2015). As such, the timescale and atmospheres that emerged from these eras points to how hotels consolidated and motivated important aesthetic productions for tourism. 

INVITED TALK: "The Creation of a Season: Sensuality, Sensibilities, and the 'Summer' in Lebanese Tourism." American University of Beirut

Invited Talk: "The Creation of a Season: Sensuality, Sensibilities, and the 'Summer' in Lebanese Tourism." Invited Talk in the Media Studies Program, American University of Beirut. Feb 2016.

In this talk I explore a question still not well developed in studies of Lebanon - nor of tourism worldwide - how might we understand a genealogy of sensuality through physical mobility that prefigures, and is an important antecedent to, questions of sexuality? This presentation considers early “tourism," through summering (اصطياف), in Lebanon to demonstrate how the nation was framed sensually in memoirs, guidebooks, and early PR materials before Independence that created specific narratives and imaginations projected of Lebanon. I explore accounts of the wide range of early "mobility-for-pleasure" and the various sensualities that became linked with: a season, the mountains, and the role of the sensing body in Lebanon.

SOUND PIECE + PAPER: "عيونك مذبحين " American Anthropological Association

عيونك مذبحين (an audio piece) was accompanied by a paper, ”Heightened Anticipation: Sensing, Sound, and Silence in the Dark,” presented at the American Anthropological Association in Denver, December 2015.  The presentation of both was sponsored by the Society for Visual Anthropology on a panel entitled: ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCESS.

عيونك مذبحين explores audio recordings made in four dilapidated cinemas in Beirut & Tripoli between 2010-2013. Two of these cinemas are now closed and two were sites of police raids.  This sound piece becomes a study in sense making through the dark. Resisting transcription, the recordings contain muffled conversations, indistinct and abstract sounds, and brushes against the microphone. In that sense, they are better understood as a reflection of the ambiguities of the field site itself, and an exploration of its sensory architecture. How do these recordings function as much more than “outtakes”?  How can audio recordings help to “sound out” the context of foreclosed and shuttered cinemas, and the attendant sensual overloads replete in the sounds in silence?

The sound piece will be available here July 2017

PAPER: "Self, Skin, & Space: Changing Embodiment through Smartphones in Egypt & Lebanon." Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Netherlands

"Self, Skin, & Space: Changing Embodiment through Smartphones in Egypt & Lebanon." Conference:  “Corporeality in Arab Public Culture: The State of the Field.”  Co-sponsored by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities (NIAS) & the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Wassenaar, Netherlands. October 2015.

This paper was an attempt to produce an update to a previous thought-piece (The Whispers of WhatsApp: Beyond Facebook and Twitter in the Middle East (Jadaliyya 2013)). Through ethnographic examples in Egypt and Lebanon it explored the role of the smartphone to the body – and the body in space. I was thinking through the manner in which smartphones function like a "skin" that mediates and tempers experiences. Namely, how various accounts of sensations become interpreted through the perceptions on/via/through the cellphone, both virtually and in the physcial world. In the context of Lebanon and Egypt how are smartphones, through various apps, producing various kinds of visible, interactable, recordable, and complicit bodies? As well as sets of bodily practices in relationship to movement, occupying, and understanding spaces of citizenship unique to these locations?

Online published version in summer 2017.

PARTICIPANT: BEAUTIFUL DATA II. Harvard University

Participant: Beautiful Data II workshop sponsored by Harvard University's metaLAB and supported by the Getty Foundation. July 2015.
 
This 9 day workshop gathered Art Historians, Archaeologist, Designers, Curators and others to explore alternative ways of exploring, visualizing, and presenting each of our own "Problem Collections" which we brought to the conference. This workshop was instrumental in pushing how I see collaboration, prototyping, and design/architecture/visual methodologies that can come into the Social Science classroom in very productive ways.

One of the outputs from this was a project collaboratively imagined by Jackie Antig, Robin Clark, Bethany Johns, Ainslee Meredith, Meg Studer, and myself - entitled Code from Corbu -which was a site responsive piece inspired by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Code from Corbu is a site-responsive installation in which six very different collections, or datasets, collide in the concrete space of the Carpenter Center. Four architectural points—corner, back, curve, and veil—are syntactically assigned as conjunctions to elicit an array of text, audio, video and still image fragments drawn from each collection. Each conjunction is assigned an internal algorithm based on the temporal and sensorial experience of working through this collision in Corbu’s space. The proposed algorithms are randomized to allow for an almost infinite play of layering, contradiction, opacity, scale, and surface. The intended viewer will pass through ‘trigger points’ in the building to initiate the display of visual conjunctions. We wish to restage the suprise, delight, and stickiness of finding resonances between datasets and the sensorial condition of the Carpenter Building, a place of (the) concrete and the abstract.