Minutes, November 2019

Middle East Sociology Working Group
Minutes, November 2019

The Middle East Sociology Working Group and the Sociology of Islam network met for an evening reception at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association in New Orleans on November 14, 2019, rather than their usual luncheon. Among the topics for discussion was the recent pressure from the Department of Education on the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, and the implications of that pressure for independent scholarship in Middle East studies and other fields.

Participants also discussed MESA’s thematic conversation on big data and mega corpora in Middle East studies, which brought together digital humanities and computational social sciences. Plans were floated for a training workshop on R, the open-source software that is most widely used in these fields, in conjunction with next year’s MESA conference in Washington, DC.

Minutes taken by Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.