REMENA is a two-year project led by Professor Lisa Anderson (and a steering committee that includes two of us) through Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. It seeks to assess and improve social science research on, and in, the Arab Middle East and North Africa.
The group will bring together knowledgeable MENA scholars from the fields of Sociology, Anthropology and Political Science to open up discussions in preliminary workshops. The broader purpose is to develop a comparative perspective on the contemporary politics of knowledge production on and in the region, with the goal of highlighting over-researched and under-researched questions and making recommendations for changing the forces that we identify as contributing to these patterns.