This chapter maps the U.S. cultural Cold War institutions, their context, objectives and investments in Islamist imaginaries and how they collectively helped build information infrastructures for Islamist social worlds. It particularly focuses on the institutions involved in influencing print cultures i.e., the Congress for Cultural Freedom - Pakistan Committee (CCF-Pak) and Franklin Book Programs (FBP) and the physical spaces in Pakistan such as universities, publishing houses and libraries where they constructed alliances and patronage networks.
Jahan Zeb Ahmed is an international Ph.D. scholar from Pakistan. His Global Studies dissertation project investigates the emergence of a popular literary and media culture around Islamist and Jihadist narratives in Cold War Pakistan. His work situates these Islamist right-wing fictions in the context of the global cultural Cold War. He is particularly interested in investigating the role of the U.S. Cold War investments in buttressing Islamist intellectual infrastructures and formations and how they helped shape the aesthetics and collective unconscious of Muslim masses in Pakistan and beyond.
To receive the pre-distributed papers, interested participants should register via this google form.
Last-minute participants can join the workshop via Zoom:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89976061973?pwd=bWlkU3lwZ1o5aU1UWmNoZXdqSW1OUT09
Meeting ID: 899 7606 1973
Passcode: 030311
The Transworlding Works-In-Progress Series is a space for graduate students to share and develop their writings with input and mentoring provided by the research community at UCSB. This workshop will feature research by graduate students whose MA thesis or Ph.D. dissertation project is global, transregional, and/or interdisciplinary. We invite participants from across the social sciences and humanities.
These gatherings are designed to be supportive spaces and sites of shared community in which graduate students receive constructive feedback on research papers, article drafts, conference presentations, job talks, or collaborative projects. Graduate thesis/dissertation topics can include globalization, comparative area studies, geopolitics, climate justice, urban or rural geography, migration, immigration, militarization, intersectional politics, global race and racism, global gender/sexuality, security and insecurity, surveillance, democratization, labor, Big Tech, infrastructure, media, global south partnerships, community building, human rights, disaster, dispossession, displacement, financialization, activism, cultural survival, indigeneity, sovereignty, and more.
The workshop is intended to foster collegiality among graduate students across different fields, help professionalize graduate student researchers, strengthen research publications and conference presentations, support researchers of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and create intellectual community and partnerships. We will also focus on shaping publications to target peer-reviewed journals, and provide space for practicing job talks.
We convene once per month for 60 minutes. The presenter will circulate a paper (no more than 25 pages, double-spaced) one week before the workshop so that participants can read and engage with it beforehand, and offer comments and questions when we meet. During the workshop, the presenter will provide a brief (5-10 min) overview of the project, and a faculty leader or a doctoral candidate will moderate the discussion. One participant will be assigned to take notes during the workshop to be shared with the presenter.
We will meet via zoom until further notice. Once we are back on campus we envision this series as a community-building experience, with free food and drink! We hope that those who wish to participate will become “members” of this community and make an effort to attend all conversations in the series, in order to support each other.
We are looking for volunteer future presenters. If you have a specific thesis/dissertation chapter or draft article submission you would like to present, please indicate that in your email (and tell us the title of your draft). Graduate students who are interested in presenting or participating in the workshop should contact: Tinghao Zhou at tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
The Works-in-Progress Series is a joint initiative led by the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies (Paul Amar) and the Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab (Lisa Parks). If you have questions please contact Paul Amar at amar@global.ucsb.edu or Lisa Parks at parks@ucsb.edu.