The workshop brings together scholars, practitioners and activists working to document the lives of Arabic-speaking migrants around the world. Scholars from The Sussex Humanities Lab and The Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex will be joined by projects based in Palestine, Lebanon, Morocco, the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Short presentations of projects in progress will be followed by discussion and dialogue.

The workshop aims to address a series of key questions:

- How are archivists, community activists, historians and artists applying digital technologies to capture the complex experiences of Arabic-speaking migrants whose voices often disappear between the cracks of national narratives or the reductive discourses of colonialism, orientalism and “the War on Terror”?

- To what extent are grassroots initiatives able to link up across transnational spaces?

- How can such projects gain access to the expertise and often prohibitively expensive digital systems required to ensure the longevity of such projects?

- What are the particular challenges of using the Arabic language, with its non-Latin script, in such projects?

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By: Jacob Norris
Last updated: Monday, 25 February 2019