Crown Center for Middle East Studies
Anti-Racism Plan
Dec. 2, 2021
The Crown Center for Middle East Studies' founding mission is to provide balanced and dispassionate research on the Middle East. Our founding principal partners served as the embodiment of diversity in the region with a director from Israel and founding senior fellows from Palestine and Egypt.
It has continued to be a priority at the center to expand the diversity and inclusion of regional representation in both our research and personnel. Through our fellowship programs and graduate student support, we have supported more than 55 scholars over the past 15 years, representing many of the countries in the Middle East. In this current academic year alone, we are supporting important research that addresses systemic racism and discrimination in the Middle East, such as Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow Alex Boodrookas' work on the rights of citizenship and immigrant labor in the Gulf, and anthropology PhD student Houman Oliaei's work on the displaced Yazidi population in Northern Iraq.
In recent years, the center has recognized and tried to address some of the challenges and inequity that our scholars from less affluent backgrounds face, especially when they commit to travel from outside the U.S. to an expensive region like Boston for a fellowship opportunity. To combat some of these concerns, we instituted new incentives to include reimbursement of relocation costs and monthly transit pass fees. Additional efforts have been undertaken to advertise our opportunities to reach a larger and more diverse pool of applications so that we can recruit a diverse research cohort that reflects equity in terms of gender, ethnicity and research focus. We take the same care to ensure the diversity of our invited speakers throughout the year in our Crown Seminar Series.
The Crown Center has embraced a similar model for the Islamic and Middle East program. We offer IMES students reimbursement for attending conferences or events in the Boston area in an effort to provide access to Boston's resources. We also are continuing to make efforts to create a culture of diversity and inclusivity in the IMES program, despite the special challenges we face this year.
Looking forward, we will create several opportunities to address issues of racism and inequity in the Middle East. We hope to hold an event on campus during spring 2021 (or fall 2021) on "Racism in the Middle East," which would highlight the work of our current scholars and include other perspectives, perhaps including Brandeis students from the region. We are also exploring ways that we can better integrate our diverse research team's experiences and expertise (faculty, research fellows and visiting scholars) to make them more available and accessible to the Brandeis student community.
Our model is POL 164 (The Arab and Israeli Conflict and Peacemaking), co-taught by Shai Feldman, Khalil Shikaki and Abdel Monem Said Aly, beginning in 2005. Our goal is to expand continuing collaborations with other entities on campus, explore additional ways to bring more students into key discussions and further address important issues of racism, inequity and discrimination.