On Monday, November 7th, Casa Árabe will present the conference "The Corporeal Life of Commerce at Sea", given by Laleh Khalili, professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London with the participation of Ángel Rodríguez García-Brazales, coordinator of the Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the UAM and director of the Master's Degree in Economic Intelligence and Geopolitics at the same university, Berta Álvarez-Miranda, lecturer in Sociology at the UCM, and Olivia Orozco, Casa Árabe's Training and Economics coordinator, who will moderate the session.  

The conference is being held in collaboration with with the Bachelor in International Relations and the Master in European Union and the Mediterranean: historical, cultural, political, economic and social basis of the Complutense University Madrid and the Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics of the Autonomous University of Madrid. It is the third session of the Aula Árabe Universitaria 4 program, which can be seen live on our YouTube channel.

The everyday life of seafarers steaming across Arab seas and serving Arab ports today is shaped not only by their daily interactions with one another and with their officers (who are often of other nationalities), but also by the corporeal transformations they experience in their sensory relationship with the sea and the stars, the weather, and the technology around them. The body of the seafarer is the fulcrum upon which global and workplace asymmetries of power, long traditions and conventions of seafaring, and gendered and racialised subjectivities all conjoin in complex and unexpected ways.  

The conference will speak not only of wages stolen and hunger ships managed by rapacious and unregulated shipping companies or the affective power of loneliness and loss at sea, but also the ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity forged aboard ships, and of the pleasures of arrival at ports. In focusing on the corporeal life of commerce at sea, we’ll pay heed to exhortations of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism to centre the lives of those forgotten or dismissed at the conjuncture of capital accumulation and raced and gendered hierarchies.  

Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. In her first two books, Laleh has examined the representations and practices of violence. These two books are titled Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency (Stanford 2013). She has also co-edited a volume with Jillian Schwedler titled Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010) that also analyses the role of state violence in Middle Eastern politics. Her most recent book, Sinews of War and Trade (Verso 2020) examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. She is currently working on a larger project about the lifeworlds of petroleum. The project will range across the decades and continents to examine how the production of and trade in oil and gas has transformed regimes of labour and property, international law, insurance and finance, and science and technology.

The emergence of “Islamic fashion” as a concept and its increasing popularity has not only unsettled established truths of fashion theory, which locate fashion exclusively in the West. It has also opened new horizons in the literature, which has begun to pay equal attention to other items of Muslim women’s dress and their clothing practices in order to explore tensions between religion and fashion in the Middle East.  

Arzu Ünal’s talk will show how fashioning a Muslim appearance does not necessarily imply a subversion of modern notions of femininity or, for that matter, a rejection of “inherited traditional Islam.” Modest and religiously inspired clothing brings together Islamic concerns and contemporary ideas of beauty. Her talk will address changing definition of modesty in veiling away from “hiding one’s beauty” toward a notion of “managing one’s beauty” based on her ethnographic work in the Netherlands.    

Arzu Ünal is a social anthropologist. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at University of Amsterdam in 2013. After a post-doctorate at that same University, she worked as a lecturer in the Cultural Studies Program at Sabancı University and the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has published on Muslim fashions and material culture in Europe and family in Turkey.  Ünal’s main research areas are gender and sexuality studies, diaspora studies and Muslim material cultures. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC-funded project titled “Stating National Abjection” at Kadir Has University (Istanbul). Her work examines islamically inspired theatrical performances in Turkey and its diasporic contexts. 

Ethical codes stipulate that professional interpreters must faithfully interpret the entire speech of the parties involved, even when it involves offensive or foul language. At the same time, some interpreters, due to personal, cultural or professional reasons, feel that in situations of tension and conflict they should mediate between the parties, and not just interpret. In the case of foul language, many tend to tone down or even omit the expressions in question. In the first part of his lecture, Professor Mustapha Taibi will talk about the results of a research paper conducted in Australia in which Arabic, Chinese and Spanish interpreters had to interpret certain offensive expressions in a simulated police interrogation. In the second part, he will engage in a dialogue with students and the audience on the difference between interpreting and mediation.

Casa Árabe is organizing this fifth session of the Aula Árabe Universitaria 4 series, to be given by Mustapha Taibi, professor of translation and interpretation at the University of Western Sydney (Australia), in collaboration with the Master's Degree in Intercultural Communication, Translation and Interpretation in Public Services at the University of Alcalá de Henares. The event will be presented by Mohana Sultan, professor and coordinator of Arabic for the Master's program.

The conference will be held in person at Casa Árabe's headquarters in Madrid, and can be watched live online on our YouTube channel.

The Gulf states remain a critical zone of global oil production and exports, despite some recent diversification in their economies. For this reason, Adam Hanieh`s lecture, Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, will survey the new trajectories of the Gulf’s oil in global capitalism, focusing on the deepening interdependencies that are emerging between the Gulf states and East Asia in both crude oil exports, and crucially, downstream sectors such as petrochemicals.

The lecture will map these interdependencies, including the new forms of corporate power that are consolidating between the two regions, and it will also ask what these developments might mean for the political economy of the Gulf states and their traditionally strong alliances with the US and Western Europe. Finally, the lecture will explore the implications of these new inter-regional linkages for the struggle against an oil-centred global economy.

Casa Arabe is organising this sixth session of the Aula Arabe Universitaria 4 programme in collaboration with the UAM's Master's Degree in International Relations and African Studies and the Master's Degree in Political Science and Public Affairs at Saint Louis University (Madrid Campus). Representing those university programs, the session will count with the participation of Marta Íñiguez, Lecturer of Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Barah Mikail, Lecturer of Political Science and International Relations Programme at Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus. Olivia Orozco, Casa Árabe's Education and Economics Coordinator, will moderate the lecture. 

It will take place in Casa Árabe's auditorium in Madrid, although it can also be followed live online on our YouTube channel.

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His current research focuses on issues of political economy, oil, and capitalism in the Middle East. His most recent book is Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 British International Studies Association, International Political Economy Group Book Prize.