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Memory as a Field Site: Interviewing Displaced Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Wendy Pearlman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; e-mail: pearlman@northwestern.edu

Extract

Six and a half years after the start of the Arab uprisings, the initial euphoria of popular mobilization and optimism in revolutionary change is an increasingly distant memory. While a few countries in the region are moving in the direction of greater openness, most are gripped by a resurgent authoritarianism that is ever more repressive. Some states are collapsing amid mass violence and humanitarian catastrophe. In others, threat of brutal punishment continues to enforce red lines against permissible speech and action, even as those red lines continue to shift.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 See, inter alia, Pearlman, Wendy, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (New York: HarperCollins, 2017)Google Scholar; Pearlman, , “Narratives of Fear in Syria,” Perspectives on Politics 14 (2016): 2137 Google Scholar; Pearlman, “Moral Identity and Protest Cascades in Syria,” British Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).

2 See Patterson, Molly and Monroe, Kristen Renwick, “Narrative in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998), 315–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Somers, Margaret R. and Gibson, Gloria D., “Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Calhoun, Craig (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 38, 58–59Google Scholar; McAdams, Dan P., “Narrative identity,” in Handbook of Identity Theory and Tesearch, ed. Schwartz, Seth J., Luyckx, Koen, and Vignoles, Vivian L. (New York: Springer, 2011), 99115 Google Scholar.

4 Malkii, Liisa H., “Speechless Emissaries,” in Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, ed. Linke, Uli and Smith, Danielle Taana (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 115 Google Scholar.

5 Inaam Charaf, “Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Syria Today,” Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression, 2014, accessed 1 April 2017, http://www.ifla.org/publications/freedom-of-expression-and-access-to-information-in-syria-today. See also Halasa, Malu, Omareen, Zaher, and Mahfoud, Nawara, eds., Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi, 2014)Google Scholar.

6 Schatz, Edward, “Introduction: Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics,” in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, ed. Schatz, Edward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.