Call for Panelists for MESA 2/8/17: Children, Youth, and Media in Conflict Zones

Call for Panelists for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 18-21, 2017 – Deadline Feb 8, 2017

Children, Youth, and Media in Middle Eastern, North African, and Gulf Conflict Zones

This panel seeks to carve out new pathways into the subject of children, media, and conflict. Abstracts are sought that critically interpret how Middle Eastern, North African, and Persian/Arabian Gulf children and youth use, play with, produce, interpret and/or are influenced by media in conflict zones. Abstracts should come from or be framed from the “voice”, or perspective of children and youth and connect how their respective media uses and practices impinge on the development of their culture, constructions of civic and national identity, intergroup attitudes, political opinions, and/or peace and conflict related practices and behaviors. To that effect, papers might examine the media uses and associated daily lives -- past and/or present -- of among others, Algerian, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Syrian, Tuareg, Yemini or Yezedi girls and boys. Papers that explore these areas as they relate to the lives of those among them who have been (forcibly-) migrated, are borderlands children, have been born due to the uses of rape as a weapon of war, and/or whom, through them, have become child mothers, are particularly encouraged.

Abstracts, and so papers, may conceptualize children/childhood or youth from a biological, legal, constructed, and/or subaltern perspective. They may either be modern or historical in focus. Field-based research from a variety of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives are encouraged. Research from communication, children and youth/childhood studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology, history and related disciplines are all welcome. To that effect, media analogous analyses of non-formal education, arts, music, dance, and leisure practices and spaces are invited. The goal of the panel will be to foster a critical transdisciplinary merger of these varied disciplinary approaches.

If interested, and for any questions, please email Yael Warshel at ywarshel@gmail.com


The following information should be emailed by Feb 8, 2017:


1) your name, affiliation, and contact details.


2) a 300-400 word abstract fitting the above panel theme and MESA’s criteria for evaluating abstracts, including being, “scholarly”, and possessing “a strong, focused statement of thesis or significance, clear goals and methodology, well-organized research data, specified sources, and convincing, coherent conclusions.”

Yael Warshel


Telecommunications, Rock Ethics Institute, and Comparative and International Education

The Pennsylvania State University


ywarshel@gmail.com