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Author: Victoria Mummelthei

Writing, Why “No One Has Studied This” Is Scholarly Writing’s Most Dangerous Comfort Zone

Let’s talk about one of academia’s most cherished myths: that identifying an unstudied area automatically creates a valuable research problem. We’ve all done it. Faced with the need to justify our research, we fall back on that comfortable phrase: “While scholars have extensively studied X, there is a gap in…

Writing, The Art of First Paragraphs: What We Learn When Students Review Each Other’s Writing

Today, I ran a peer review session for “Writing the Middle East for Your Daily Read.” The setup was simple: Students exchanged their papers and read just the first few paragraphs. What emerged was a fascinating pattern that writing teachers see constantly but students rarely notice until it’s pointed out.…

Explorations, Beyond Location: Rethinking Cultural Heritage in an Age of Global Flows

When Nefertiti gazes out from her vitrine in Berlin’s Neues Museum, where exactly is she looking? To Egypt, her place of origin? To the thousands of tourists snapping photos? Or perhaps to a future where questions of cultural heritage transcend our obsession with fixed locations? Her presence in Berlin has…

ai and the Middle East, The Algorithmic Ghosts of Empires Past

When we talk about artificial intelligence in the Middle East, we cannot untangle it from the region’s long and tumultuous history with power – the lingering spectres of colonialism, the brutalities of military occupation, the revolving hierarchies of ethnic and sectarian oppression. AI does not exist in a vacuum, but…

ai and the Middle East, data and the Middle East

In the ‘Data’ chapter, Crawford highlights how datasets used to train AI systems often decontextualize and dehumanize the people and cultures represented, treating them as mere ‘raw data’ to be extracted. From a Middle Eastern cultural studies perspective, how might we analyze this ‘extractive logic of data’ playing out in…

ai and the Middle East, Laboring Under Old Hierarchies: AI’s Fraught Inheritance in the Middle East

Kate Crawford’s incisive analysis in the “Labor” chapter of Atlas of AI reveals how technologies like artificial intelligence carry forward long-standing logics of exploitation inherent to industrial capitalism. When viewed through this lens, the Middle East emerges as a region where AI’s impact on labor is inseparable from enduring historical…