An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Raad Khair Allah (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-26).
Contemporary Arab Diasporas: Reimagining Nationhood in Arab Cultural and Digital Feminism
This interdisciplinary digital project examines the literary and artistic contributions of Syrian and Palestinian Muslim women in the Western diaspora since the 1970s. Navigating migration, legal status, and intersecting identities, these women play a central yet under‑recognised role in cultural production and diasporic nation‑building, preserving collective memory, asserting political identity, and fostering transnational solidarity. By investigating how both non‑citizen and citizen diasporic subjects leverage accessible AI‑assisted creative platforms (e.g., Canva, Soundtrap) to produce art, music, and text, it illuminates the interplay between transnational connection and distinctive diasporic experience, showing how arts, technology, and society co‑produce nation‑making narratives. By combining close readings with computational tools like Voyant Tools and Google Vision, this project reveals patterns and insights in cultural productions that traditional methods may overlook, including recurring motifs, lexical fields, and visual grammars that travel across genres and decades. The project will collaborate with the CDCS to build a public‑facing, searchable archive that organises materials by themes such as identity, memory, return, cultural heritage, and social justice.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e