Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish, Assistant Professor of Middle East history at Ohio University, is co-editor of Jadaliyya, which was recently featured in a Chronicle of Higher Education article.
Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish
Established a few months before the Arab uprisings began, Jadaliyya (the Arabic word for “dialectic”) has become a reference for many professors in the field. It reaches beyond academe, too: Updated daily, the site boasts about half a million unique visitors a month, and its articles are widely shared on social media. It aims, in the words of the founding editor, Bassam S. Haddad, to offer a scholarly, left-of-center “counter discourse” to the mainstream conversation about the Arab world.
Analysis of that world is already plentiful in the media, in blogs by individual academics, and in specialized publications. But rather than viewing the region through the lens of U.S. foreign-policy debates, Jadaliyya includes contributions from artists, activists, and academics from many disciplines. Though it publishes in five languages (English, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Turkish), Arabic readers make up a third of its audience, and a majority of the editors are of Arabic background. The goal is to “write about the region from an inside-out perspective,” says Mr. Haddad, who directs the Middle East-studies program at George Mason University.
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