“The Making of Amman: Stories, Tours, and Traffic Jams” by Dr. Betty Anderson
An ACOR Online Lecture
Wednesday, August 26 at 7:00 p.m. Amman local time / 12:00 p.m. E.S.T.
Click here to register.
Registration in advance is recommended. Zoom participation will be capped at 100 listeners; thereafter, a livestream will be active on ACOR’s YouTube account (click here to subscribe for notifications).
About the Lecture:
Dr. Betty Anderson will present the research that she, Dr. Fida Adely, and several local researchers have been conducting in Amman over the last few years. Their research seeks to collect stories from Amman’s young residents about how they experience a city that is rapidly changing. Their stories map a city that is geographically and socio-economically fragmented, with increasing frustrations about the possibilities of physical and economic mobility. It is also a city where new and old neighborhoods generate a strong sense of belonging. In the talk, Dr. Anderson will be recounting these stories and analyzing the different methodologies the research team has employed to uncover them, including conducting one-on-one interviews, focus group sessions, and interviews-on-the-street; undertaking walking tours of neighborhoods all over the city; and producing photographic essays and interactive maps.
About the Lecturer:
Betty Anderson is a Professor of Middle East History at Boston University and the author of Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State (University of Texas Press, 2005), The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (University of Texas Press, 2011), and A History of the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016). For this project on Amman she has been working in collaboration with Fida Adely, Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith & Progress (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
