Contours of Thought — The Humanities and the Possibilities of Anti-Discipline
Columbia hosts a keynote panel on what becomes possible when scholars read across and against established disciplinary and regional boundaries.
Why we picked this
Four scholars who have spent decades working across disciplinary lines ask whether those lines were ever the right way to organize knowledge in the first place. The MENA studies angle gives it real specificity.
This symposium asks a pointed question: what becomes possible when scholars stop respecting the boundaries between fields and start reading across them? The keynote panel features Nadia Abu El-Haj (Columbia), Khaled Furani (Tel Aviv University), Ussama Makdisi (UC Berkeley), and Helga Tawil-Souri (NYU), four scholars whose work has consistently crossed the lines that separate anthropology, history, media studies, and political thought.
The focus is Middle East and North Africa studies, a field where disciplinary segmentation has often reinforced colonial categories rather than challenged them. But the implications reach further: if the way we organize knowledge shapes what we can think, then reorganizing it is not just an academic exercise but a political one.
The Thursday keynote panel is free and open to the public at the Heyman Center. A Friday roundtable continues the conversation but is restricted to Columbia faculty and invited guests. Registration required via Eventbrite.