Letter to the Editor

Perhaps it is fitting, amidst the unending slog of pandemic teaching and a year of escalating geopolitical crises across AfroEurasia, that our long-delayed issue of RoMES presents a plethora of voices arraigned around our Special Focus topic “Spotlight on Pedagogical Perspectives and the Politics of Representation.” The idea for this topic emerged from a 2020 MESA panel attentive to volatile and contentious debates in the public sphere concerning Muslim identities and Middle Eastern geopolitical realities and social movements. Over the course of the past year, professors, students, activists, and law makers have sought to highlight patterns of misrepresentation, misattribution, and misappropriation in what amounts to a collective effort to position MENA dynamics as part of a global movement to redress inequity and establish new pedagogical, legal, and political paradigms. While many of us may feel discouraged when scrolling through our social media feeds replete with evidence of damaged and precarious lives and territories, this issue of RoMES should also inspire us to stay engaged with the discursive power afforded us as members of an expanding vision of MESA. First, Corey Sherman (University of California, Hastings) opens the issue with an “ethnographically informed textual and structural analysis of public high school curricula in Washington, D.C.” and the processes by which this curriculum represents and, arguably, “produces” the Middle East in the minds of its students, teachers, and administrators. As school board meetings across the U.S. become the staging ground for defining past and present “truths” of the nation and drawing new definitions of “us” and “them,” Sherman’s essay shakes us out of the confines of higher education and reminds us of the stakes involved in public debates. We shirk these public debates at the risk of further isolating academic knowledge production and at the risk of MENA lives. Second, Ranjit Singh (University of Mary Washington) leads us through the techniques and strategies for addressing the BDS movement in an undergraduate seminar. As MESA members, we have debated the role of the organization in analyzing and labeling historical and contemporary events in Israel/ Palestine. Singh pointedly draws our attention to the classroom as a site for critical engagement with the methods and the ethics of how we as scholars, professors, and members of the global community navigate debates around one of the more significant movements of our time. Third, Mariam Alkazemi, Sameneh Oladi Ghadikolai, Marilynn Oetjens, and Edward L. Boone