 encounters. Sorry, I had a pop-up window as part of SOAS Festival of Ideas. This should be a real treat today. You have an amazing group of panelists who've all worked on cross-cultural encounters in their different ways, all in an interdisciplinary way. And from a variety of regions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Now you might say cross-cultural encounters sounds very vague, but I think what they all have in common is that they have looked in particular at the way knowledge travels across the world, how knowledge emerges and is developed and all in their different ways. They are trying to challenge the very often very Eurocentric ways in which knowledge is generated and allowed to travel and to be disseminated within academia and beyond. And as you'll see, I think all of them have engaged with collaborators outside the UK, outside their institutions, very often outside of academia as well, artists for example. And so long before decolonising the curriculum became a buzzword or a concern within British academia, they were already asking critical questions about the direction of travel, of knowledge and the very way in which knowledge emerged. And very important questions about power relations in the way in which knowledge emerged about cross-cultural encounters. So we should have time for Q&A at the end, but first of all let me introduce you and introduce Professor Lindy Wade Dovey, who is a professor of film and screen studies at SOAS. She's the principal investigator of five-year ERC funded project called Screen Worlds Decolonizing Film and Screen Studies, and this is what she's going to talk to us about. She's also a researcher, a teacher, a filmmaker and a film curator, so she's very much practitioner as well. And her work aims to combine film scholarship and practice in mutually enlightening and creative ways. She is from South Africa originally, she is an expert and a very passionate expert on African filmmaking. And just to mention two of her key books which have already become absolute classics in the literature film in Africa, Creating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals 2015 and African Film and Literature from 2009. She's also a film festival founder, director and curator, and more generally I think she has really helped to raise the profile of African cinema within the UK. So I think we'll see Lindy Wade's film. There's a video now. I'm sorry my video has been disabled, I'm sorry Ellen, sorry. Can I just ask the host to enable my video? I'm not able to put it on. Okay start my video, great. Okay thank you so much. Hello everyone, thank you Ellen for that extremely generous introduction. It's so wonderful to be here and I'm going to be sharing my screen because I've actually pre-recorded my presentation tonight because I wanted to embed a small video clip and some images. So you're seeing me presenting this a few days ago and then I look forward to the discussions with everybody afterwards. So here goes. Hi everyone, thank you so much to Armina for inviting me to be part of this panel and thank you very much also to Ellen for chairing and to my fellow panellists and of course thank you to all of you for being here to listen to us and participate today. So I'm really delighted to be given an opportunity to share with you the vision and work for the project African Screen Worlds Decolonizing Film and Screen Studies which is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council and hosted here at SOAS at the Center for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies. The project began in June last year, June 2019 so it's only about a year old so we're really still in our infancy and we have of course really had to reimagine elements many elements of the project due to COVID-19 striking just as the project was getting up and running but despite the difficulties what has been most exciting for me as the PI of this project the principal investigator has been seeing how through people working as a team towards shared goals and self-flexivity we've been able to turn many of the constraints and problems into possibilities or even more meaningful and perhaps hopefully even more decolonized cross-cultural encounters. Our project currently involves more than a hundred people from all across the world and particularly people from different contexts in Africa and in Asia but so that you can at least see some of our core team members I'd like to play you a clip from our project trailer which is something we put together quite quickly last year as the project was launching to try to explain our vision for the project. For many years I have been researching Nigerian film politics and social change as well as cinema audiences. Nigerians have the largest film industry in Africa and are big consumers of locally and within the industry. With an estimated population size of 170 million Nigeria is a powerhouse of creative energy and its film industry has been marked by immense business acumen and engagement with new technologies yet the Nigerian film industry its film and filmmakers are relatively marginalised in film and screen studies scholarship which is a graph. As part of a Screen Worlds project I'm excited to fill this gap by exploring how Nigerian screen worlds are rapidly evolving as well as the various platforms through which Nigeria and African films are accessed and consumed in Nigeria. This project also includes making a film that will examine the nature of contemporary Nigerian screen worlds through small large and immersive screens and delve into the fascinating history of how the Nigerian film industry was born. It's of course a huge privilege to have the funding to do a project with so many different people from around the world involved which constantly brings cross-cultural encounters into play. The problem in my view is the dominance of the arrogant lone wolf scholarship model which is very much a model tied to a colonial patriarchal system of knowledge production where one person is the star the expert on a topic that is really too vast for one person to begin to understand. If we translate this problem into our particular field of film and screen studies we can see that if we respect that films emerge out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts then no one person can ever become an expert on the expertise of global scholars or world cinema. We can only research aspects of this vast field in depth. This means that the task of turning our field from a largely Eurocentric one as it's currently constituted into a far more globally representative one relies on all of us working in the discipline. To avoid the issues of lone wolf scholarship the screen worlds project has a methodology that is based on four main principles. First of all an emphasis on knowledge exchange rather than capacity building. Second cross-cultural comparative analysis. Third co-authorship between people who specialize in different cinematic cultural contexts. And fourth creative approaches to research. So I'd like to just go through each of these and give you a few examples from the project. Okay so first of all in terms of an emphasis on knowledge exchange rather than capacity building. In our view the reason that it has been so difficult to decolonize many social sciences disciplines for example development studies is that hierarchy is built into the core vocabulary of these fields. For example the word development itself which implies hierarchy in which the west is seen as superior to the rest and sits along some imaginary teleological scale of evolution. Another term used regularly in development studies is capacity building often paradoxically when discussing egalitarian partnerships between the global north and the global south. But again this very term suggests that the global north needs to help the global south to build this capacity rather than rethink the very nature of these relationships which are of course based on historical exploitation of the riches of the global south by the global north which has led to our current unequal distribution of resources. At Screen Worlds coming from an arts and humanities perspective we prefer to think about creative partnerships where everyone is valued as an equal player with a distinct knowledge base and personal history and personal experiences and where we can all contribute ideas and learn from one another. We also recognize that sometimes what is needed is not cross-cultural or transnational encounters but rather safe spaces in which people who are located within one place or who share a particular identity simply want to have discussions on their own and this brings us to the very definition of decolonization which has distinct meanings in different contexts. So we don't feel like it is the right of our project to finally determine what decolonizing means and then try to compel others to take that on board. People in their own contexts need to decide that for themselves and our project can only act as a kind of prompt and conversation partner. On this front I'd like to highlight as an example the workshop that we ran with Nigerian colleagues on the topic decolonizing film and screen studies in Nigeria which was held in March of this year and co-organized by Dr Anulika Agina and Dr Patrick Oloho. Rather than being a regular conference with 15-minute papers that are rattled off and then quickly forgotten it was conceptualized more creatively and openly as a space for self-reflection and sharing about pedagogical practices related to teaching film studies and filmmaking that different personal and institutional approaches. Those of us who are not Nigerian contributed ideas and thoughts through a special workbook we made in advance and through presentations during the workshop but the focus was very much on creating the right conditions for an event mostly run by Nigerians or Nigerians who are teaching in Nigerian universities and COVID-19 helped to ensure this by striking just before those of us who are based in the UK and Europe were due to fly out to Nigeria to participate meaning that we could only participate in the event at a distance through Zoom. Not being able to have these cross-cultural encounters was of course a huge disappointment for us but perhaps this also created the dynamic in which Nigerian participants could focus more on their own contexts. Okay I'd like to address our second and third issue is cultural comparative analysis and co-authorship because I have a specific example of how these two are working together on our project. Now just building on what I was saying before inevitably interesting perspectives on film pedagogy in different cultures and institutions and continued to arise across the workshop in Lagos and this is something that we are encouraging in other aspects of the project as well for example in our edited collection called global screen worlds in which we put out an open call for participation last year and through that have been pairing up scholars from very different parts of the world and in some cases who have never met one another before who have similar interests nevertheless to co-develop and co-author research. There are 30 participants from around the world involved in this collection and subordinating can emerge through our pairing methodology. For example we have an established professor in Madagascar paired up with an early career researcher in northeast India where they are looking together at the popularity of Korean drama in each of these two contexts. Now before COVID-19 happened we had planned for everyone to meet in person at a workshop to start building up this research but given that this is not possible for the moment we've instead moved this research development process online and this has in itself been a humbling lesson in the inequalities across cultures where some people have had easy access to the digital world and other people have not. But in most cases people have found a way to get online for conversations and are really excited about the approach that we're adopting which is creating a network of care among scholars located in the past world and very importantly cross-generationally with a mix of established and early career scholars. Being forced to shift online has actually made us realize that for so long we've been working on assumptions that really don't need to hold. For example waiting for in-person conferences to make connections and network with other scholars in our fields but we all know that in-person conferences are very expensive not very environmentally friendly and often not very equitable in terms of who gets access to visas or not. Beyond this rather than put pressure on our participants at this very difficult time we have delayed our deadlines and are instead encouraging a slow scholarship mode one in which we are slowly yet collectively co-creating this edited volume educating one another about our own areas we work on and we hope this will also bring more coherence to the volume as a result. Finally the fourth screen words principle I mentioned before was adopting creative approaches to research. Quite literally our creative approaches involve moving away from conventional academic outputs such as written books and articles and towards modes of knowledge production that are less rational and logocentric for example films and audio visual essays. In a field like film and screen studies there's an even greater argument to think about our objective study film in audio visual ways so as to respect the medium itself. These creative approaches can also potentially help us to decolonize our practice by undisciplining some of the strictures and chronologies of academia through invoking and involving different senses the emotions and affect and finding new therapies and ways of thinking about the world. Creativity can also be more inclusive through allowing the use of different languages beyond the dominance of English and through a less strict set of criteria and expectations for publication. Some people for example who struggle to write academic papers might bloom when making an audio visual work because they are visual rather than textual thinkers. I would just like to close by saying that even though I've critiqued the lone wolf mode of scholarship here it does have to be a space made within academia of course for individual creativity as well. Collaboration is wonderful but it can be idealized and it can be very difficult as well as extremely inspiring. So we need appreciation I think of how each human being is not so much part of a monolithic essentialised culture or even an assemblage of intersectional identities. Some people are unique and constantly in dialogue with the world. This kind of idea of the human being is described beautifully by the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Biccolo through his concept of mantisma so I would like to close with his words. Jean-Pierre Biccolo says mantisma is a way of apprehending the world based on my experience, my education, my culture and my environment. Mantisma is a system of thought that we virtually assimilate to a language that is unique to each individual, a language that I permanently negotiate with the language of the other with whom I would share an experience, education, culture and a similar environment. Thank you once again for listening and I look forward to our discussions. Thank you so much Lindy Wey. This was really a striking start. Sorry I activated my microphone I hope you can all hear me. This was a striking start and you really raised some themes in the video that I'm sure the other speakers will come back to and which will definitely return to in the Q&A. So I will just introduce the next speaker, Dr. Dina Matar. So Dina is a reader in political communication and Arab media at SOAS. She's also Chair of the Center for Global Media and Communication and also Chair of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS. She used to be a correspondent and an editor covering the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe and her research is interdisciplinary of course but really located at the intersection of communication, politics and culture, memory and narrative practices and she's also an activist and all with a particular focus on the Levant. So Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria as areas of research. She's also the co-founder of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She's the co-editor of the SOAS Palestine Studies book series and she's the co-founding editor of a brand new book series on political communication and media practices of the Middle East and North Africa with Bloomsbury Press and her monograph what it means to be Palestinian, stories of Palestinian peoplehood has been used as a script for the internationally renowned animation movie The Tower. So many of us would love our books to be turned into films. Dina has achieved this and I think that ties in very well with what Lindiwe was just saying about diversifying our research outputs. So Dina is going to talk to us about narratives and the coloniality. Yeah everyone, thank you Helene and thank you Lindiwe for such a brilliant introduction to the panel. I feel a little bit kind of I cannot stand in your shoes but I'll try. So without further ado I just don't want to give a long talk but I want to try and talk about what really has motivated me through my work experience as a journalist and then later on as an academic and I want to focus on the notion of the concept of narrative and how we can use narrative as a methodology plus an object or study or the center of our studies to understand how we can produce different ways of knowing and decolonial practices. And I think I speak here more like from the media scholarship which remains very much dominated by western-centric approaches and normative approaches to understanding how media functions in society. But in this talk I draw on the premise that powerful discursive and political entities including the mainstream media play a key role in the production of knowledge in the world and this is what we all know about it is not like rocket science. But I also suggest that discussion of the global south as an imagined speciality often defined by its perceived differences from the global north must address how this imagination is interlinked with narrative as image and discourse. It can be filmed, it can be screened, but also it's the text and also how we speak you know the language, the language, the cultural language that we speak. And as such I ask how narrative plays a role in the imagines and persistence of particular epistemic formations that are sustained by material and structural conditions of power, but also how narrative can also play a role in resistance and in producing counter narratives of knowledge. I focus on mediated narratives that is the production and the consumption of narrative in the media but also in the public space. Not in the sense of looking at narrative as ordinary stories but in the sense of situated histories, situated histories and experiences that come from a particular socio-political context. Because these situated histories can tell us about lives and experiences that emerge in structural and material conditions and I do not ignore these material conditions in the production of narratives. More directly I also think about mediated narratives in my work as modes of experiencing the world and also as the work of interpretation of the world. So it becomes you know maybe it sounds too academic but it becomes quite an interesting aspect of looking at narrative as producing different ways of knowing and experiencing and interpreting the world. While I work basically on the Arab world and on political communication which is the relationship between politics and communication, also thinking about politics as being about culture and about cultural encounters. I'm more interested in mediated narratives about and by about Palestine and the Palestinians. My interest in this area is partly personal, political because I'm Palestinian and partly because I believe that perhaps looking at this context can contribute to decolonial thinking understood as a particular kind of critical theory and particularly as a particular kind of critical theory that is relevant for the study of media and communication and political communication practices in the non-west. So my questions when I go around and you know I kind of get very passionate about that is I try and understand what people do with media, how do they do their work of interpretation and why does it all matter you know what is the point of it. The arguments about decolonial critical theory is familiar to most of you here and particularly members of this panel and to many of the audience particularly if you are from SOAS. But the work of decolonial approaches is central to the wider project of what we call de-westernization, internationalization and decolonization of media and communication studies and also the subfields of media and communication studies such as audience studies and internet and digital studies more broadly. In my research over the past 15 years I have explored the relationship between narratives who produces them, who uses them, who is allowed to produce them, who is not allowed to produce them and I also think of you know and locate them within the social and political context in a sense I never forget the context in terms of trying to explain what these narratives mean. For me a former journalist and academic I also see news as narrative as a form of narrative that is dictated by structures and boundaries norms and principles but I also think of journalists and academics as storytellers in their own way and maybe this is just my way of thinking about it. It makes it easier for me to have made the shift from a journalist to an academic. But going back to Palestine I think Palestine is a rich and productive context to interrogate the role of narrative in the construction, the maintenance and as well as the subversion of powerful epistemic formations that have prevailed in the production of knowledge about the Palestinians, the representation in the media, how do we see them, how do we imagine the Palestinians and that's the imagination is mostly coming to us you know not myself but most people who have not been to Palestine or have not really been in contact with Palestinians it's an imagination that is comes through the media in different ways and I think that these the role of media in supporting enhancing or legitimizing particular ways or particular cultural practices, particular ways of knowing in context other than Palestine has been well discussed and well rehearsed in the field of media and cultural studies but the debate about whether this role can be ascribed to what is called as the power symbolic can concentrated symbolic power of media institutions or whether it is about global capital or whether it is about the relationship between political entities and the media or the ability of some entities to cement the control through the media remains an open question you're still debating this question to this day for media power is not a tangible reality but a social process organized around distinctions between an manufactured media world and the ordinary world of ordinary people in the case of Palestine as has been well rehearsed in the literature there is no doubt that how much we in the west see hear about and know about Palestine and the Palestinians comes via mainstream western media and other digital platforms this is particularly true in this age of crisis the COVID crisis and I think one of the key issues of the COVID crisis is that it has actually made invisible people like the Palestinians unless we want to go and find out what is happening we don't know what is happening out there and but also the question of who decides what is being said and heard who gets to speak cannot be disconnected from global dominant narratives that produce common play commonplace assumptions about the other and then episteme which embed themselves in the media the academy and other places the power of narrative in the sense is its ability to act as a prison through which political relations are seen who has the right to narrate whose stories and memories enter the history books are questions at the core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict its global narration and appropriation and to how it is understood and how it is to be dealt with culturally and politically uh the right to narrate is also a question of enunciation when why where what for Walter Mignola talked about that a lot of talking about you know post criminal the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and this can lead to the creation of knowledge and transformations at the very heart of any decolonial inquiry so who we have you know we need to keep asking the questions when why where and where these are kind of key questions in you know the 101 of being a journalist of course Edward Said for him the right to narrate as he said in his article commissioned to narrate published in 1984 that long ago is relevant because this struggle struggle over narrative is also a struggle over knowledge and power what I want to say in the end here is that I you know my first book which is what it means to be Palestinian I began the book with the intention of trying to find out media's role in people's life and think about Palestinian's reaction to media narratives and when I went to interview Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine and Israel the question that arose was a different one because what turned out to be the case is that the people that I interviewed wanted just to tell those stories and this is what somehow pushed me into that direction because I went in with an interpreted framework with a theory to try and apply it to the to these people but what happened is that through my you know empirical work it turns out that what the informants the interviewees told me actually structured the knowing in different ways and I want to end here by saying that you know one of the most interesting aspects of the fact that we have digital media available for people or kind of in different in different places is the fact that people can use it to narrate but whether they are narrating to themselves or to a smaller group or to the outside world is is a big question but it's worth looking at these narrations it's worth looking at the production of stories about lives and experiences and use that perhaps as a way to think with and about the project of decolonization that I think many of us are interested in. Thanks sorry you spoke a lot. Thank you so much Dina that was another amazing presentation and I have to restrain myself from asking you lots of questions at least the way you ended showing us how collecting narratives in itself is a deeply political act we'll definitely have to return to this in the discussion so thank you so much Dina we are going to now move on to Dr. Marlos Janssen who is a fellow anthropologist I didn't introduce myself as an anthropologist at the beginning I was a bit rushed sorry but I'm also an anthropologist of West Africa just like Marlos so Marlos is a reader in West African anthropology she is associate director of research at SOAS and her research really is at the intersection of anthropology and religion and like many anthropologists Marlos has actually achieved the extraordinary feat of doing long-term fieldwork in two completely different locations in West Africa the Gambia and Nigeria and to actually produce two books coming out of work so her first monograph was Crossing Religious Boundaries Islam sorry that's her latest monograph actually her latest monograph is called Crossing Religious Boundaries Islam Christianity and Yoruba Religion in Lagos that's coming out very soon in 2021 with Cambridge University Press very highly expected monograph and her previous one coming out of the fieldwork in the Gambia is called Islam Youth and Modernity in the Gambia the Tablighi Jamaat that was also with Cambridge University Press in 2014 and that monograph won that year the RAI the Royal Anthropological Institutes very prestigious Amore Talbot Prize for African Anthropology so hopefully Marlos's next book will win the prize another time and now Marlos is one of the presenters who have collaborated with practitioners outside of academia she has collaborated with Nigerian award-winning photographer Akin Leye and that resulted in the traveling photo exhibition entitled the Spiritual Highway Religious World Making in Megacity Lagos and Marlos will talk to us about decolonizing the study of religion. Thank you very much Helene for this very very kind introduction I should mention that also Helene won the RAI Amore Talbot Prize for African Anthropology so fantastic work on Senegal so I should have mentioned so anyway other than Helene I want to thank to other people first of all thanks to Amina Akin to Stephanie Gerand to Angelica Baishiera for organizing this festival and for organizing this panel and also many thanks to the SOAS Decolonizing Working Group and to Mira Sibaratnam to Amina Akin and to Andrea Cornwall for steering the discussion about decolonizing teaching and research at SOAS. I have learned a lot from these discussions and I'm still learning it's a very short presentation and I will try to be very short I want to talk briefly about how I have tried to decolonize my research as well as my research methodology so as Helene already mentioned my work is at the intersection of anthropology and religion in West Africa in particular again there and Nigeria are my future ethnographic specialization and both anthropology and the study of religion have a colonial history when anthropologists as well as scholars of religion speak about religion they often refer to doctrine to believe and to dogma. This Eurocentric conceptualization of religion is dictated by what anthropologist Halal Assad calls a Protestant legacy that needs to be located historically but should not be taken as being universally valid. For many of the religious practitioners with whom I worked in first the Gambia and later in Nigeria religion was less a matter of orthodoxy that's correct belief and doctrinal conformity and much more of orthopraxy correct religious practice. Rather than believe many of my research participants in Nigeria's former capital Lagos tended to privilege the performative power of religious practice that helped them cope with the contingencies of urban living and this entails that I approach religion first and foremost as lived practice. In order to study religion through the vector of religious practice and lived experience during my research on the Tbiliki Jama'at in the Gambia I recorded the biographical narratives of young Tbilikis. Now for those of you who are not familiar with the movement Tbiliki Jama'at is a transnational Islamic missionary movement that has its origins in the reformist tradition that emerged in India in the mid 19th century. My monograph Islam youth and modernity in the Gambia explores how a movement that originated in South Asia could appeal to the local Muslim population youth and women in particular in a West African setting and by recording the biographical narratives of five Gambian Tbiliki men and women the book provides an understanding of the ambiguities and the contradictions young people are confronted with in their renegotiation of Muslim identity. By giving my interlocutors a voice and Dina already spoke so eloquent on narratives so by trying to give my interlocutors a voice I wanted to challenge the conventional assumption presented in the media of the Tbiliki Jama'at as a fundamentalist movement as a breeding ground for potential radicals. Since the movement's aim is to restore a pure form of Islam by returning to the fundamentals of the faith as laid down in the Quran as well as in the Sunnah the prophetic traditions we could say that the Tbiliki Jama'at is a fundamentalist movement. However my interlocutors interpretation of fundamentalism differ from how it is presented in the media so my attempt to question western frameworks of analysis that are often taken for granted and my use of biographical narrative as a means to put my interlocutors experiences and voices at center stage tied in with my decolonial research approach but although I've tried to do justice to my interlocutors voices in the end the stories that I recorded are not just their words it is me who recorded them and interpreted them and it's possible that my interlocutors do not recognize themselves in these stories. Unfortunately I was unable to ask them since they were not interested in reading my book all they were interested in was me to convert to Islam so that made me aware of the limitations of my research methods in an effort to move beyond conventional text-based research methods and my current project I collaborate with a photographer in order to visualize how religion is being embodied and I will come back to this collaboration in a moment but first I would like to breathe to briefly talk about the Tbiliki books after life. Not only do anthropologists and scholars of religion have the tendency to conceptualize religion in terms of doctrine and belief they also often seem to think that to theorize means being illegible in order to reach a wider audience than just academics I wanted to write in an accessible style and I think that my life story approach helped to draw in a larger readership beyond the usual suspects of fellow anthropologists, religion scholars and Africanists. I was therefore very pleased and honored when I received a message from novelist Sadie Smith who asked whether she could endorse my book in her novel Swing Time. It turned out that she had used several of the ethnographic situations that I described in my monograph in a fictionalized form in her novel Swing Time which is partly set in the Gambia if you haven't read it already I can highly recommend reading it. The reason for mentioning this to you is not just to self promote it illustrates something that I find very important namely that we bring our scholarship to the public that are making it relevant to present-day social problems. As academics we have greater responsibilities to the world than just our intellectual parochialisms and I think this is also what Andrea mentioned this morning in her wonderful response to Adam Habib's wonderful keynote lecture when she said we have to rethink the role of the scholar Hermit. So multiplying the voices in public debates not only the voices of our research participants but also the voices of novelist photographers filmmakers activists is in my opinion part of decolonizing research. I started by saying that the study of religion in Africa has long been pursued from a hegemonic western perspective reinforcing a Christian conceptualization of religion that emphasizes belief at the expense of practical dimensions of african's lived religiosity therefore there is according to the professor of Islamic studies Abdul Qadir Tayyub a pressing need for a reorientation of the study of religion taking to account the trans-regional connections between the european centers of knowledge production and the former areas of imperial imperial european outreach and acknowledging the validity of different ways of seeing the worlds and highlighting this validity Atil Mbembe whose name has already been mentioned several times this morning calls for a less inward-looking and parochial attitude and a more open what he calls plural diversity which he defines as a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions. So inspired by Mbembe in my current research project i have tried to study religion in Lekas in the plural diversity by transcending the conceptual as well as the methodological rigidity that dominates much scholarship on religion and this approach is very much in line with the ways in which my research participants experience their religion indeed many of them describe themselves as religious shoppers who had changed their religious allegiances or who had shifted between them opposing conventional understandings of religion as a unified category and as a bounded regime for my interlocutors combining multiple religious traditions is an integral part of daily experience in Lekas. So let me conclude by saying a few words about my collaboration with the Nigerian award-winning photographer Akin Tunde Akin Leye which resulted in a traveling photo exhibition the spiritual highway religious world-making in Mecca city Lekas. Well due to Covid-19 the exhibition is currently stored in a colleague cellar in San Francisco rather than on display at the University of Stanford. By crossing boundaries between academic and artistic modes of representation Akin Tunde and I have tried to study religion as a set of esthetical as well as spatial practices of world-making that explores how religion takes place in daily practice and how religious practitioners are engaged in making religion happen thereby allowing for a broader conception of religion in which doctrine and greed give a way to individual experience and to practice. By adopting an ethnographic approach that foregrounds subjectivity and lived experience and by collaborating with artists such as novelist photographers as well as filmmakers we will be able to develop new ways to generate as well as to disseminate knowledge. Such methods which aim to undiscipline knowledge a phrase which was already used by Lynn Dewey in her opening film are at the heart of current epistemologies to decolonize knowledge. Here should be mentioned that the research excellence framework the REF and for those of you who are not familiar with the REF it's a system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Well the REF still measures academic output largely by conventional means i.e written publications. Although a growing number of academics are developing creative research methodologies that go beyond the limitations of textual methods as this festival as well as this panel shows these have yet to be recognized by those judging the quality and the impact of our work. Only then can we make real headway with decolonizing knowledge. Let me stop here. Thank you. Thank you so much Marlos another amazing presentation and there's more and more to discuss. I completely agree with you that collaboration with artists really is one of the way forwards and that we actually stand to learn a great deal from artists about how to see the world in new ways and how to really better understand local epistemologies. So I do hope this exhibition will come out of the basement in Stanford and travel some more. So before I move on to Amina I was asked to just remind the audience that you can use the Q&A function to ask questions. We will try to answer them as we go along if we can but otherwise we will summarize them at the end. So we now move on to Dr. Amina Deakin who is director of the SOAS festival of ideas. Amina is reader in Urdu and in postcolonial studies that SOAS she is chair of the Decolonizing Working Group and she has a forthcoming monograph 2021 entitled Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Women's Poetry with Anthem Press. That sounds amazing. I absolutely want to read it when it comes out. She is also the co-author of Framing Muslims, stereotyping and representation after 9-11 with Harvard University Press 2011 and she has co-edited lots of works including Contesting Islamophobia, Media, Politics and Culture 2019 and Muslims Trust and Multiculturalism New Directions 2018 and also Culture, Science, Poro and Modernity in Muslim Writing 2012. So very productive her research is always interdisciplinary and it engages with contemporary contexts of Muslim life as well as the politics of culture in Pakistan which is her country of origin. She has been a collaborating partner on two projects, one the AHRC funded International Research Network on Framing Muslims and the second one is the RC UK funded Muslims Trust and Cultural Dialogue and Amina will speak to us on Muslim cosmopolitanism in Muhammad Adil's Masjid Qutaba. I'm not going to try to pronounce this so over to you Amina. Thank you. Thank you Helen and thank you to fellow panelists for really inspiring papers. I hope that I can measure up. I think it also reiterates the atmosphere of creative thinking that is present at Zoaz that is part of how work develops and formulates over time. This particular paper comes out of my projects and it is actually something that goes back to what Dina was saying about that struggle over narrative so this this paper while I've kind of worked in lots of interdisciplinary context is is that aim to look at narrative more closely. As someone who has taught in an area studies department and moved to an English department in the School of Arts there have been some deep learning experiences about how disciplines can determine our knowledge. So in this paper I attempt to unpack some of those biases by referring to my research that is of relevance to a number of disciplines but gets lost in silos. I reconnect with the notion of cosmopolitanism that was referred to in this morning's opening address with Professor Adam Habib and the concept that I pick up in this particular paper of la convivencia as a means of reconnecting with the political philosophy of the Indian Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal. He has historically been understood more as a Muslim separatist and less as a cosmopolitan intellectual. I summarize a close reading of one of his major poems that was written toward the end of his career in Urdu and I'm going to race through this so forgive me for not being detailed. I underline the ambivalence of his philosophy politics and the narrative of modernity that he contributed to at the turn of the 20th century from his vantage point as a Muslim intellectual, a poet and a political activist. Through this poem I'm interested in considering the influence of Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula on Iqbal's thought. Iqbal, a strong believer in the idea of the perfect community the Ummah was always in search of the past to be able to connect to the present and to bolster his critique of nationalism. To understand the phenomenon of community I turn to the form of Urdu poetry as a popular narrative genre that offers an alternative glimpse into the lived politics of religion and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. In my research I have looked at the crossover value of Urdu poetry as a signifier of national local engendered cultures forming an intercultural mosaic across multiple identities and identifications. It is in this spirit that I turn to the genre of Urdu poetry to search for the earlier narrative of Al-Andalus. Interestingly Al-Andalus comes to prominence as part of a late 19th century reformist drive in Urdu poetry and given the time constraints I'm going to jump over the 19th century poets to give get to Muhammad Iqbal who is referred to as early modern and modern. Both categorizations are particular reference points in European histories of the subcontinent so I use them as a point of reference rather than as an indication of discrete categories. As a poet Iqbal is claimed by many he according to Anri Shimmel he was a talisman in Pakistan and Ali Hamani the supreme leader of Iran claimed an Iqbalian heritage in 1986 with the proclamation that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the embodiment of Iqbal's dream. Her fees in Linda Malik place Iqbal at the heart of Lahore's 19th century performative tradition embodied in a regular Mosheira poetry symposium. He is celebrated nationally along with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the founding father of Pakistan. Active in politics he gave two presidential addresses in 1930 and 1932 at the annual sessions of the All India Muslim League and was a delegate at the second and third round table conferences to discuss India's constitutional future. He was well known to Jawaharlal Nehru and to Jinnah. In his search for a utopian Muslim community Iqbal looks towards a cross-cultural mix of Al-Andalus as an alternate space and it's that idea of utopia that I want to question. Over a period of time his poems shifted from a territorial recognition of the self to a de-territorialized homeland and offered alternative readings of the Muslim holy land of Hijaz. The political scientist and scholar Robert Lee argues that Iqbal is a proposer of a general authenticity seeking to liberate humanity from the clutches of both tradition and modernity, from the mysticism of the East and the reason of the West, from the imperialism of the West and the submissiveness of the East. Lee's reading of authenticity suggests that Iqbal was looking for a middle ground between an Indo-European secular ethics and a moral tradition and not simply a civilizational difference. The history of Al-Andalus with its mixed Muslim descent and complex settlements from the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe appealed to his philosophical thinking for that reason. Given Iqbal's engagement with modern Western philosophy Al-Andalus presented a center ground from which to negotiate the colonized Muslim self and the notion of free will through the philosopher Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd is recognized for his contribution to the formation of secular thought which became a major force in the European Renaissance. His philosophy borrowed from Aristotle and Plato's analyses of the law and contributed ideas of his own. Iqbal's thought also reflects a shift from a devotional mysticism to rational way of thinking for Muslim communities. He was interested in developing a cross-cultural strategy as part of the reconstitution of a new Muslim personal and cultural community politics. This idea of human agency and the pull toward a greater moral force is part of his well-known poem Masjid-e-Qutbah the Mosque of Cordoba which was written in the 1930s when he traveled to Europe for the third round table conference in London and visited Spain in 1933. In his close reading of the poem The Comparative Literature Scholar Yasin Nurani argues that the poem transforms erotic desire into political sentiment by projecting it onto the masterworks of Andalusian architecture. His reading is suggestive of a turn toward authenticity in Iqbal's poetry as he puts al-Andalus at the center of an inversion of European history. Masjid-e-Qutbah is according to this reading an example of anti-colonial resistance that turns into nostalgia for the lost paradise of al-Andalus. Nurani's analysis is centered on a reading of authenticity. I argue that instead of utopia Iqbal looks for an alternative to territorial anti-colonial nationalism in the cosmopolitan cross-cultural mix of Christian, Jewish and Muslim influences and the heritage of Hellenism. Iqbal's referencing of Akal reason in the poem is an equally powerful force that mediates an all-consuming ishq love. This inclusion conveys his ambivalence toward communal identity formation in India. In my close reading I analyze shifts in mood, tone and form to interrogate the subjectivity of the poem and how it might be read cross-culturally. Masjid-e-Qutbah opens with the phrase Silsila-e-Rosa Shab repeating pattern of day and night o creator of events. The first stanza of the poem establishes the pattern of day and night, the metaphysical explanation of time and space and confirms Iqbal's linkage to a rich poetic heritage. The Urdu scholar Shamsuraman Faruki notes it lets the reader tap into a variety of traditions such as Arabo-Persian, Indo-Persian, Indo-Sanskrit and Urdu. Its references to natural and cosmic objects, the rhyme scheme and meter allows eternity to be captured. Faruki is of the view that Iqbal's poetic aesthetic draws its unique heritage from Vedic and Islamic philosophies of time and being to represent a hybridized literary tradition and this is what he says makes him immensely readable and distinctive as a modern poet. Later in the poem the body becomes a receptacle of divinity and the reader may recognize echoes of the philosophy of Vahadul Vajru, the unity of being. But this consuming love is contrasted with the corporeality of the body of the Indian infidel. He is the intermediary between the Sufi and the sovereign, the colonizer and the colonized, a spokesman for a global community. Iqbal celebrates the great mosque as a Mujza-e-Fan miracle of art and pays homage to the beauty of its endless columns and the minaret. The missed mosque was built by Byzantine craftsmen and is a stunning example of architectural syncretism. It is a historical example of hybridity as Shohat and Stam have noted in their critical discussion on syncretism. The great mosque at Qordoba hybridizes the diverse styles that passed through Spain, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Moorish. In Iqbal's verses there is no mention of the Christian cathedral that is part of the mosque's reconversion in 13th century. Instead, Iqbal locates the heroic spirit of the Mothe Muslim, the Muslim man in the mosque's aesthetic form. He too is eternal. This sea-lead prophetic Muslim hero travels across rivers that are peopled with Arabs, Kurds, Muslims, Jews and Christians, crossing civilizations and challenging and inward-looking marginal existence. His spirituality is elastic and his travel transformative. The theme of divine love and the Muslim hero are signifiers of a Sufi poetic heritage that Iqbal borrows from the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi and Ibn Arabi the thinker and makes it into his own by developing a unique concept of the self, Hudi, including influences from the German philosopher Nietzsche. For Iqbal the mosque's aesthetic beauty epitomizes the deep connection between the message and the messenger of Islam. The heroic Muslim figure is cast beyond spirituality to the political discourse of citizenship, arguing for an accommodation of the borderless individual, a time traveler, a storyteller, a warrior. This is the figure of the Muslim modernizer who wishes to explore beyond the local networks of the Ulema and communitarian politics to form a society based on principles of equity. I'm sort of just going to kind of go towards the end by talking about the ending of the poem which is on a mixed note of resignation, optimism and triumphalism. It turns from the mosque to the valley and a pastoral imagining of the simplicity and the melodic quality of the song of a peasant's daughter symbolizing hope. The poet narrator affirms that the future is due to change, letting go of nostalgia and echoing the spirit of anti-colonialism. He emphatically categorizes a life without revolution as akin to death and calls for a community that is committed to action, bravery and revolution. There is a worldly cosmopolitan vision embedded in the poem and my analysis on the poet's cross-cultural interpretation that gravitates towards the politics of the self, free will and resistance to the domination of the West. Iqbal's rendition seeks a cross-cultural model to counter the colonial subjugation of Muslim subjectivities in India and the wider Muslim world. His position has elements of authenticity but is not completely dependent on it. The geographic location of South Asia with its hybrid and cosmopolitan cultures is significant and offers a necessary counterpoint to the cosmopolitanisms of the Ottoman Empire and Al-Andalus. It also fractures the idea of a normative universal civilization. In my reading of the poem Iqbal does not appear to advocate a civilizational discourse of Muslim sovereignty and a singular utopian good life. Instead, his poetic voice suggests through its silences lyrical rendition and hybrid aesthetics of what a cross-cultural community might be. The poem disrupts the temporality of a universalizing Islamic community. A poem such as this can contribute meaningfully to the theme of cross-cultural encounters and decolonizing knowledge with its interpretation of cosmopolitan ideals and hybrid Muslim communities by a South Asian poet understood as a Muslim separatist in India. Thank you. Thank you so much Mina for demonstrating very forcefully the power of literature to decolonize ideas about Islam and to provide a completely different vision of Muslim thinking from the one that unfortunately circulates around us on a daily basis. So we'll have to come back to that. I thought that was really powerful this notion of cross-cultural cosmopolitanism. So thank you so much for that. We will now move on to our last speaker and again please remember to put questions in the Q&A if you so wish even before the actual Q&A is open and so our last speaker is Dr Simon Rove. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing correctly but please do correct me afterwards. So Simon is a reader in diplomatic and international studies at the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS where he co-founded the field of sports diplomacy. Perhaps he's coming to SOAS. So Simon has worked with key stakeholders in the world of sports diplomacy mainly practitioners and he has also acted as council for many many national and international bodies many of whom you will know in national Olympic committees but also anti-doping organizations and athlete and advocacy organizations and there are many publications to his name I will just mention his book Sport and Diplomacy Games Within Games from Manchester University Press in 2018 and Simon will talk to us about cultural communications knowledge diplomacy in 2020 so over to you. Thank you so much Helene thank you to Amina and indeed thank you to all of my colleagues for such fascinating papers and it is a privilege to work with such interesting people needless to say and it's a no-biddle responsibility to to use a sporting analogy to play cleanup hitter to all of these star performers but I will nonetheless try over the course of the next 10 minutes or so to give some context to a piece of work I've been looking at embracing knowledge diplomacy. Now what do I mean by knowledge diplomacy well two things there one what do we understand by and how do we use knowledge and two what do we mean and understand by diplomacy well in some senses starting with the latter first diplomacy is one of the most culturally defined and indeed colonizing features of contemporary society and by contemporary I would in my full embrace of diplomatic studies consider the contemporary to be the last 500 years because the diplomatic has gone on as long as human policies have been able to communicate with each other and in that sense the diplomatic process involves three core activities three things that we can recognize whether we are an official of state or in negotiating with a seven-year-old as I was a little before this presentation and they are communication representation and negotiation and in those three elements when they come together we see the process of diplomacy so diplomacy has been and in some senses is a really good example of the power structures that we think of as constraining enabling and indeed shaping the contemporary world whether at the national level where there are very obvious national symbols of diplomacy flags colors representations of space particularly national boundaries and these are things that provide structure and indeed contests to our thinking about the way we live in the world whether as individuals as communities as nations as nation states and the distinction there is important between those who represent a nation and those who are operating within the nation state construct and indeed as global communities and particularly in 2020 we find ourselves touched by many dynamics within global communities whether that's as a response to COVID-19 or through reactions to Black Lives Matter advocacy campaigns etc there are a number of ways in which we can see global communities forming and operating through many of the channels that others have spoken about whether that's through media through the technologies that you know the 21st century affords us or indeed through the artistic form of poetry picture film etc but one of the things that my understanding of diplomacy has sought to put forward and this is where the you know the sport diplomacy dimension perhaps kicks in a little also is to challenge and deconstruct what we mean by state-based diplomacy certainly and think here about the diplomacy's that took place before we had the construction of the western version of a nation state before what many of my contemporaries in the IR world would think about in terms of and by our forgive me I mean international relations scholarship and would think of as the the Treaty of Westphalia the 1648 founding documents or indeed documents of nation statehood but actually the diplomacy had gone on for millennia before then before this little corner of the globe in Europe decided that actually we should organise the world well in central Europe to start within these things called states and that spilled over over the course of the next three 400 years into the nation states that many of us all of us nearly live in today and indeed that we are in many senses blighted by in there addressing the global problems that we face but in doing that and thinking about how diplomacy has in some sense is being the greatest manifestation of colonisation there is also a converse way of thinking about some of that diplomatic practice and here I make a distinction between diplomatic practice and the diplomatic theory if you like or concepts or indeed some of the border international studies scholarship that goes on so this is why I focus particularly on working with practitioners be that as you know the diplomats themselves because although they may carry official identification they also carry multiple other identities and here I'm you know often drawn back to the work of castells and multiple identities of self and projection and reaction and in that sense the cultural encounters that take place you know in the very cliched but nonetheless true sort of diplomatic sways with ambassadors being greeted on formal carpets with uniforms and pluminary and all sorts of ways of thinking about how does that convey those cultural messages and what are the underpinning cultures that transcend indeed those national manifestations so whether that's a national uniform a national dress all of this comes with a set of values a set of normative assumptions that we should be ready to challenge because those cultures themselves either poorly represented through the national lens or indeed you know constructed as an other to the predominant western version of diplomacy being that you know an embassy an ambassador this is how the world is operated it and much of that has been codified in things like the united nations through the vienna conventions on how to conduct diplomacy you know a document that was agreed in 1951 that took best part of 400 years to agree on how you do it and in many senses is still very opaque the idea of diplomatic privilege for example diplomatic immunity these are things that have cultural huge cultural heritage and not just something that is to be tested when you know an ambassador or you know becomes involved in a civil or indeed criminal case within particular territory or sovereignty but I think this also speaks to the importance of understanding space and knowledge within that because the knowledge in itself brings with it cultural values and in some senses perhaps what I'm saying is not hugely novel but I think within the certainly the last couple of years and particularly in the last 20 25 years in the industry and I don't use that without thought the industry of higher education often thoughts be and indeed you know established in many regards to be the harbinger of knowledge to be the repository to be the way in which knowledge is shared through different generations and indeed you know the one of the close relationships and I think this is something that requires further elucidation further research is the relationship between the research that goes on and the practice and the training that diplomatic practices whether the diplomats themselves who go to certain universities and end up in certain jobs in certain parts of nation state good indeed so I can look you know very inwardly at this you know it's only establishment as a product albeit perhaps an arms length one of you know the British government as a means of colonial representation and negotiation and communication throughout the rest of the British empire as was so I think here is a really important opportunity to look at ourselves and think about some of the epistemological understandings of knowledge diplomacy and nowhere could be better than that frankly in my opinion than being at sub-ass and I think that's where you know understanding how universities in the 21st century are both in some senses and put colloquial part of the problem as well as part of the solution in making sure that knowledge is understood for its cultural and political values not just as a neutral or edifice in the 21st century and to those who you know have a particular interest i.e. so you know some of us who work in it needless to say have you know vested interests and we would recognize that I'm sure but we also need to have a dialogue with practitioners who step outside you know those much-vaunted too often cliched ivory towers of academia and that's why working with practitioners allows us all and I think it's been evident in the course of the dialogue this evening to talk about other facets of knowledge other ways of interpreting knowledge that aren't just for example according to the ref in written form it's about impacting people's lives you know globally and locally and in that sense I'd share my sort of thoughts of one of the most culturally rich experiences of working at SOAS being able to engage with a large number of people some of whom in very distant lands but some of whom much much closer is to look at an example of the town in Bedfordshire of Luton now Luton doesn't get a lot of good rep it's had you know as a town a lot of issues it has a significant far white contingent and it has a huge number second only to London a number of different ethnic minority groups living within its boundaries as a municipality but one of the things that I found most fascinating about working with a couple of organizations non-state-based non-governmental organizations in this regard is to think about the opportunities for cross-cultural exchange through the medium of in this instance cricket and cricket as a means of talking to different South Asian across the full gamut of that term South Asian communities and indeed non-South Asian communities too but being able to utilize that as a means of engaging in a dialogue that talks to a number of cross-cultural intersectional issues around gender healthcare education and tying it through the formal diplomatic channels were appropriate two colleagues in and indeed populous in Afghanistan particularly in terms of girls participation in sport in afghanistani curriculum and as afghanistan has suffered so much in the last 15 years 15 20 years being able to make a real difference through our scholarship and through the institution of the university to afghan girls in their participation in enjoyment of a sport such as cricket I think is made you know is an example of how knowledge diplomacy can work and can be effective but needs to be sensitive to and recognize all of the cultural and politicalities far more so than even the economic or political ones and I think that's where I will leave my remarks tonight but thank you very much and it's been a real pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with everyone thanks so much Simon that was a great way of ending this panel and thank you so much for bringing a new form of practice to the table sport and reminding us through your introduction your presentation of the issues surrounding knowledge diplomacy that global politics isn't necessarily just where it's as politics on the tin that there are other places where we can we should actually be looking for where politics is actually happening and thank you for reminding us that there are many other forms of knowledge than the way in which it's often conceptualized in university settings so that's a beautiful way of ending this panel and I think we'll now have a discussion with all the panelists before going into the all four questions now I'm not sure how much time do we actually have with the panelists before we open the Q&A is the moderator here we have 31 minutes left so we can use that so we'll take a few minutes for the Q&A so I don't know if all panelists perhaps want to show themselves I'm going to go back to some of the notes I made so there were really some unexpected threads that connected the different presentations to each other and I guess I would perhaps start with Lindy where you did among other she listed the principles through which her research project is working and I was quite struck by this notion of knowledge exchange rather than capacity and building and this notion of creative partnerships which I think some of the other speakers also wrote up in different ways and I wanted to ask perhaps do you go to other speakers in practice how do we I mean this is something we all aspire to more equal practices of knowledge exchange less unidirectional north south ways of setting up partnerships but in a current context in which the institutions within which we work are often fighting for their own survival and placing more and more restrictions on our work and in a context in which as was mentioned several times UK and European migration regimes make it so difficult for people outside of Europe to circulate on an equal basis with Europe based academics how do we actually do this in practice and is there a way in which the current COVID-19 situation might open up new opportunities so I don't know who might be able to comment on this I'm happy to kick off with them and I'm mindful that I spoke last but I think the one of the things that I would point to there is the opportunities for sort of people to people diplomacy as a concept if you like as a label but I think all that speaks to is the different communities being finding themselves in the same situation to a greater or lesser extent and whether you're in you know Luton or Islamabad the scenario of you know not having enough resources perhaps not having enough shelter food you know those basic Maslow hierarchy of needs kind of thing does provide a community of practice and the affordances of technology now even in some of those very you know desperate situations means you can connect with different communities and I think that provides something for you know the human condition of the soul if you might know you know just as a starting point but I don't think it think it provides a sort of experiment bench where solutions can be thought out and applied in different circumstances and you know the resources may be different you know things like the climate may be different and make a fundamental difference to your opportunity to put some of these things into practice you know it's it's difficult to make cricket in a Bangladeshi refugee camp if it's under two feet of water for example but nonetheless the opportunity to think through these are the steps and some of the knowledge exchange that I've seen amongst practitioners I think is you know is fascinating and heartening and and you know can make substantial difference I think this is where the the role of the university in its conceptual times the knowledge exchange is not for it to necessarily flow through you know adoring Bloomsbury to be regarded as impact but for it to be constructs an environment in which different communities can talk to each other and I think that's really where those recognizing the sort of connectivities of different communities whether they are you know geographically locale or indeed spread you know that's the the opportunity that I think we have to recognize some of the challenges such as COVID-19 which is just you know global in every sense of its its manifestation other than individuals being poorly wherever they may be can I come in yes of course thanks Simon you made me think about again the way that I've been thinking about the current global crisis is that crisis is a productive context by productive it's a context that makes us kind of think about issues that we are either not talked about in the public quite a lot but they need to be examined but I think there is a challenge here and this answers the question by Tembe in the chat which is the challenge of funding and the challenge of you know the legitimacy and the authority of who is able to to kind of begin to probe uneasy questions I mean COVID-19 has uncovered we know about you know the inequalities in terms of the BN community the kind of the problems with the lack of access to information the disinformation fake news conspiracy theories and so on it's just like a big huge confusion a fog but I think Simon has brought up an interesting aspect which is it's also a productive context it gives us an opportunity to think beyond the box that's all I think maybe some other people who want to come in as well absolutely yeah thank you Dina anyone else would like to come in on this yes Marlos sorry I was unmuting myself with the wrong mouse this is my other computer sorry I think it's a very important point and it's also ties in with something which Adam Habib said this morning so it's about I've caught my forthcoming book crossing boundaries it's not only about crossing religious boundaries it's also about thinking in the plurality to link back to what Achille member said and it's also ties in with something which Lynn Dewey said about how do we do actually this kind of collaborative work because it's still very often we at SOAS who bring in the research money so what does it mean to put more names on the cover of a book is that really decolonize research is co-authoring a form of decolonizing knowledge I'm not sure if it's still the money which the person who is first on the cover brings in I'm not sure but I think this crossing boundaries I chose that title because it's also something which I find really important it's about crossing geographical boundaries how can we put scholars from different continents into conversation with each other and I think the current crisis we are in helps us to bring about this kind of conversation and it's also about crossing disciplinary boundaries and maybe we should think beyond multi-disciplinarity this key concept in Adam Habib's keynote and we should think transdisciplinary whatever that may mean and I really like the idea of Lynn Dewey to bring together people established scholars and early career researchers in this kind of platforms where people produce knowledge together in as part of a kind of a discussion I would like to hear more about that but I think it's more about transdisciplinary and about crossing also boundaries between academic and artistic work you're absolutely right no this is this is great can I just jump in there Lynn and say thank you Marlos and also I think I was connecting to think Simon was saying there about you know not needing to go through that university door necessarily to create those connections I'm a big proponent of kind of ground up connections that form authentically between people real human relationships I just feel like I've had too many experiences of kind of institutional you know attempted institutional connections with memorandums of agreement and that kind of bureaucracy that comes very much top down and tries to artificially create these connections and you know a lot of the critique around terms such as collaboration and decolonizing in the way they bandied around comes you know from from that kind of that kind of spirit there's an excellent special issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies edited by Kali Kudsiara I always go back to which talks shares a lot of experiences of scholars in the global south and how they've been treated by research partners in the global north and a lot of it just a lot of the critique just comes down to very simple basic human relationships about how people are treating one another and just to say yes with the funding issue as well I'm very conscious you know with my own project that our funding is coming from the European Union and that creates I think an extra pressure to be extremely self-reflexive at every point in the project to come back to what Marlos is saying we can be quite skeptical about yes to what extent does co-authorship and all of these other you know things we're trying to do you know how equal is that when we look at the origins of where the funding is coming from so it's a big responsibility we have to to be very open I think to be critiqued as well to make ourselves vulnerable to critique and I think we do that through the live through the live connection whether that's live online or live research that many have spoken about in the panel as well that the scholar who only works with texts kind of puts themselves you know shuts themselves in a room and doesn't allow themselves to be vulnerable or to be critiqued can I also jump in following on from the interview yeah I think all those are really great points and one of the things I was thinking of there was with regards to the projects that I've been involved in which have been to do with Muslim representation and Muslim communities and especially the Muslims trust and cultural dialogue project which was very much about working with sort of community groups here as well and I think when we going back to the first project when we did Framing Muslims and this goes back to the question of funding and who trusts what and what kind of collaborations and we had gone for a presentation at University of California at Irvine and and people there were very suspicious well not everybody but some of the scholars are very suspicious that this was funding that was coming from the arts and humanities research council and they did not think that that was kind of a free space for us to be researching something that was so highly emo charged in terms of sides and I suppose you know Irvine had particular kind of relationships with regards to that question but we certainly I feel going back that was 15 years ago that that was I was maybe naive as a scholar at that point but I just didn't think that the British system at that point the the funding system was was that directive or that research funding was that kind of had that level of surveillance attached to it perhaps that we feel more so now I think especially and when we were working with the Muslims trust and cultural dialogue project I think there were a lot of questions asked about who we were funded by and whether people felt because you know this we're talking about this in the in a time of prevent and in a time of how communities are under surveillance by the state so how free do you feel to talk to researchers you know we're sort of coming from a particular perspective and although asking people to trust us but you know that trust is being embedded within the structures of funding that are coming via a state dynamic and the state the relationship of the state to those minority communities is very fraught so that kind of diplomacy question is really interesting that that Simon's talking about as well there so I think what what sort of I felt towards the end of that research because we had some some amazing conversations and we did a lot of work but there was a lot there is still a lot of stuff that I cannot put in writing and that I cannot you know that that people did not want to speak openly because they did not feel that this was something that was fully trust worthy so it is a question it is a question of how there was a turn in funding you know global uncertainties all that sort of research funding direction and flow is is kind of connected and it's topical and it's important but it's also to what extent does it really allow the freedom for the scholar and the and the sort of person on the ground that you want to collaborate with and you want to engage with do they even want to collaborate with you on that basis that was the real challenge for us in our project yeah it's a very important point you just made and I just want to point point out to a very interesting point that was made in the chat and which I actually wanted to embed in my question but which didn't come across is the very real issue that UK universities actually take quite a lot of the funding which we often want to direct to external partners including in countries of the south and that's I think we've lost Helen let me echo her point while we try and get her back just to say that I think that's one of the real difficulties of working within the higher education structure particularly of universities and this is you know the university model in itself is something that has colonised to a greater or lesser extent and we shouldn't underestimate the influence and shaping influence of British and western universities on education more globally and I think this is where actually working with other partners so for example working with you know sporting sector as I have done you know since well really London 2012 from my point of view that that has actually been a far greater enabler of dialogues and putting people you know having the conversations that you wouldn't have otherwise because the university is not necessarily a helpful way of having that that conversation and you know the the skills it were the degree to which I've mastered it others will judge but is to to bring some of its relevance into the universities through the university's front door but actually to leave a lot of it outside and to leave a lot of it to be communicated and and engage with by practitioners across the piece and not you know as a metric of you know something that the western colonial experience has brought to us so I think there is another reason for us to think about how knowledge rather than you know some of the manifestations through things like universities and research come to bear. Helene we have you back. Yes I'm very sorry it's something happened to my connection these are the vagaries of those kinds of situations what I wanted to come back to was a very important point I think Dina made in her presentation so Dina you talked very eloquently about the this notion of narratives being used as resistance and you also said that you actually many narratives are not heard at the moment and many communities are actually invisible in this crisis in which we are I recognize parallels with Africa very few people know actually what is going on with COVID-19 in Africa and yet absolutely certain that there are things we can learn from the way in which African states and African communities are dealing with the crisis at this current moment but we never hear that so how can we use knowledge and how can we use narratives from these regions in which we work to actually provide solutions to deal with these crisis solutions for the future and particularly how can we disseminate this knowledge when we can't even physically go there. Very good question and it's a very good question and comment I don't think I have the answer all I can say is that we have to keep trying I mean this is the role you know how do we see our role as academics as teachers as activists so on we try and think of ways of engaging with these communities so in a sense I keep reading whatever comes up and you know you really have to search these days if you are you know you can go on social media and you find a lot of stuff but you sometimes worry about you know kind of fake news and issues around that so I think the question the issue is to keep engaging and in response to it's the permanent kind of struggle of visibility and visibility of being heard and not being heard so it has a long history of denial or kind of not recognition of the other in different place and we have a lot of stuff around that in the postcolonial scholarship but I think in terms of you know there was a question by Temby which is again so how do you frame your research for it to be accepted and it's very difficult because you know if you want to get funding and you say well I want to go and write about you know stories and narratives of ordinary people living in a continuous state of conflict or a a liminal state it's a continuous liminal state in the case of the Palestinians what does that mean you won't get funding it's just a matter of you kind of persevering to try and write you know and try and do something around it but I think you know because we were talking in this panel and the other question related to that so you know just very briefly I don't want to take people's time but if we go back to the book uh I both are which is what it means to be Palestinian um it what I found is that one of the things that helped me is to try and not impose a frame it's not to have a frame to describe what is going on just allow people to speak in their own voice and not even editing what they not even kind of taking it and making a thematic analysis out of it and somehow this you know kind of attracted some filmmaker who wanted to do something similar so it can happen but it kind of if look you know I just think about it as you know I don't know how it happened but basically it's just you know it's just part of our mission you know why why do we do what we do and what is the reason behind that and it's just a question of being too you know being committed and interested and kind of engaged with what you're doing that you are able to produce something kind of interesting about it but I see the COVID-19 crisis as giving us the context within which we can begin to speak back and begin to uh make visible these you know you know African ways of dealing with uh with COVID how are you know how are people living their lives it it'd be very productive it'd be very interesting you know think about it as the same as Simon was speaking about sports you know think about it as a way of new way of encounters and so on sorry I spoke too much I want others to come no that was great thank you the issue I have now because I was thrown out I can no longer see the questions that have appeared in the Q&A so you see any question here that is to you or that you'd like to address could you raise your hand because when you go back into the meeting you can no longer see them so first Marlos and then Simon I think there was a question from Anakin Newman and I don't see you but nice after such a long time to see your name again on the list so how we can bring in what are the kind of journals where we can publish more creative work and I think that's a very difficult question and probably other panelists have better ideas I published a photo essay together with Akintuna Akelea and many journals were quite interested in that new format so and it is a very I think an interesting way of presenting work so photo essay is one opportunity and I think many journals have this kind of open call where they ask for special issues once or twice a year and you can bring in well you can bring in your own idea there like a special issue on creative work well I think it's time for journals to rethink how they disseminate knowledge and I think we as the ones who are contributing to these journals have an important role there to play well I think there is a way and we have to be creative which also means that we have to rethink our own role because very often we have different voices so we write differently when we write a journal article or a book than when we write a block why are these voices are so different why can't we not bring our own voices more into conversation with each other and why do we think that to theorize means that you have to use a certain discourse and I think being a teacher and all of us are also teachers where we sometimes have to well express our knowledge in a different way for people to better understand why are we not using that in our own books and in our own writing and I think so it's time for us to rethink our own voice and I think then also journals will probably pick that up and also change the way they're the formats how you can present knowledge right thank you and Simon do you also want to address a question yeah I think I'd certainly echo Marlos there I think the alternative ways of presenting our research is you know is a necessary absolutely necessary function of our job in the future I need to pick up on the question that Rubina asked 10 minutes ago so about an equal world I'm afraid I don't I'm not hugely optimistic about the equality of our post COVID post Brexit world I do see reasons to be hopeful in other regards but I think equality is not necessarily something that is top of a lot of agendas or indeed feasible given the structural forces that are to work which is why they are so it's so important to be aware of them and so important to be able to challenge those those structures and forces that exacerbate inequality and lead to greater stratification of societies I think one of the features of our contemporary world is being able to think about the things that bring us together in other ways and in that sense I think equality can be equality in not just in you know perhaps traditional economic terms of you know equality of opportunity or equality of finance and but actually equality of thought process and equality of access to you know what the sustainable development goals offer all of us every member of the human race up to 2030 they're not without their flaws by any stretch but they provide a a means in a framework for action and particularly the way that they can be manifest through things like education for for girls in large parts of the world and for you know utilisation of sport of physical activity as a means of encouraging education sustainability I think these are the things that give me you know reasons to be cheerful and wake up in the morning but I think equality as it was understood in the 21st in the 20th century is not necessarily going to be a feature of our global society for the next you know generation I would say sadly yeah I think we all worry about this and about the state of the planet these two things we'll worry about which way things will go um other two others have questions that I have coming to me so I'll just quickly answer them Rubina asked about whether the British Empire featured in the work of other South Asian poets writers of the time uh yes yes in in lots of people's works I mean um Harley who is a predecessor there's also Shibley Nomani there's a Firak or a Paris so that there are a lot of people around at the time who are writing um that that you can pick up on another question was about we talked about situating narratives earlier from Sanjupta in the discussion what is Iqbal's legacy among the youth today is there a need to read Iqbal's cosmopolitanism vis-a-vis the current trend of identity politics interesting question Iqbal's poetry I mean I was I was talking about it in a very writerly way but it's it's definitely poetry that is appropriated by both radical groups and by secular groups so it's a question of in in terms of political rallies and all those types of events who is going to be using what part of the poetry and in what way and that's really important in terms of knowledge development and how it's taught in in in the education environment what parts of his poetry are being applied because you can take anything in in context you know in the context that it helps you to communicate the message that you wanted to convey so in in increasing identity politics world that can be used in very particular ways Asma there was a question about fundraising for the arts and charity sector which is not to me which is just going out to everyone there was always caution on the parts of the organizations I've worked for about suspect sources national lottery etc links to Israel so about funding and its connections where does everyone has a question about the ethics of funding nowadays and I think young people ask that question a lot more and and so are we in terms of how and where funding is coming from whether that transparency is available to us or not is another sort of question and there's another question for the panel does the panel despair that we are still wrangling with hyper nationalism and race especially institutional racism and education policing recently in the NHS I don't know that's a huge question a huge question there is perhaps time for one final answer if anyone would like to take this one perhaps we could ask you Helene what have you taken from this experience you mean the yeah well it's these are all questions we're grappling with and I think you are all setting the bar very high in terms of reflexivity in research and and trying to go that extra mile in you know addressing all these obstacles of funding bureaucracy surveillance from the state the impossibility of people to get access to visas of technologies but you're showing that there are ways in which we can establish more equal collaborative relations and I also think this notion of disseminating our work in different ways is absolutely crucial I mean we're not we're not all going to be supported by Zaley Smith for a novel clearly that that was at the top Malos but there are all the ways of disseminating our research with us I think would be both more impactful and more equal and reach far beyond the confines of universities so I think you all demonstrated this in in powerful ways and really set the bar very high for the rest of us so thank you for that and just to close I should probably invite everyone to attend the keynote lecture which is starting just now with Professor Fallon Gum from Boston University a fellow Senegalese who is going to speak on the Odyssey of Ajami and this little known tradition of writing African languages in Arabic script which I know well from Senegal and which I think Fallon Gum is really the world expert now so this should be fascinating and I will all invite you to join it reminds me to thank all the panelists for outstanding presentations for a great discussion and of course all the participants for great questions and to apologize for my internal problems and you know coming later and all of that I really enjoyed this so thank you so much to you okay thank you