Minutes, November 2009

Middle East Sociology Working Group

Informal meeting at the Middle East Studies Association, Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, November 22, 2009.

In response to last summer’s oversubscribed gathering at the ASA in San Francisco, the working group engaged in unprecedented advance planning and reserved a mezzanine room at the Globe café on Copley Square, one block from the conference site. We amassed a half-dozen tables and introduced ourselves as a committee of the whole before ordering lunch and holding smaller-group conversations.

Members of the working group reported that arrangements have been made for a regular session on the Middle East to be included in each year’s meeting of the American Sociological Association, and that a request has been submitted for a thematic session at the 2011 ASA meeting.

Among the proposals that emerged from these conversations were for roundtables on Middle East sociology at the ASA, a graduate research workshop on Middle East sociology to be held in conjunction with the ASA, if funding can be secured, and a repository for survey data from the Middle East.

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