About
the Conference
Last year, the American University
of Sharjah and the Sociological Association of
the UAE jointly sponsored the international conference “Globalization
and the Gulf.” This inaugural conference
looked at the Gulf as a cauldron of unprecedented
socio-cultural transformation. The forthcoming
conference on the “Social Sciences in the
21st Century” will examine the degrees of
resolution of the changing paradigms adhered to
by the individual social sciences in how adequately
or not they explain the changes of globalism, which
were documented in last year’s conference.
As a sequel of “Globalization and the Gulf,” thus,
the American University of Sharjah and the Sociological
Association offer this second international conference
orchestrating seminal social theorists to assess
and conjoin several basic themes. We hope to begin
to forge a new overarching social discipline that
better explains the realities of an ever accelerating
and ever changing world.
Accordingly, one of the early questions to be
addressed is whether the traditional social sciences
of political science, economics, anthropology,
and sociology have sufficient resolution to elucidate
the unprecedented and disjunctive changes across
the world—that are nowhere as profound as
in the Arabian Gulf.
In light of all the drastic transformations that
have been witnessed in both this region and the
world, the American University of Sharjah and the
Sociological Association of the UAE hope to take
the lead in offering to the world generally, and
to this region, to an audience of scholars, policy
makers, social planners, institutional leaders,
and business executives, the new explanatory models
as to how the various key nodes within the new
world economy interconnect into a new social formation
as the core of the new global order. Ultimately,
the aim is that the social engineers will use this
new synthetic approach to ameliorate the social
contradictions inherent in the new social reality—especially
in this energy nexus of the world.
Globalism integrates different cultural traditions
simultaneously into a single interactive arena,
the world market, with different nodes like the
Northern Emirates, which offer a particularly inclusive
dimension. Attempts to generate new paradigms are
currently much debated, such as those advanced
as postmodernism,post-colonialism, post-structuralism,
post-processualism, cultural studies, contextualism
and so on. We hope that the seminal thinkers convened
at our conference will mesh the resolute parts
of each of these trial approaches into a new coherent
social approach. Then, this new social approach
should be able to more thoroughly describe and
explain the profound social transformations of
the Gulf within the cosmologies of the Arab World
and the West. Furthermore, then, the eminent scholars
will consider whether the blurring of disciplinary
boundaries will build towards a post-disciplinarity
of the social sciences, which we hope to outline
at our conference. The hope is that researchers
will be able to employ various techniques from
a combined social sciences tool kit to answer specific
questions of society in the Gulf.
The American University of Sharjah and the Sociological
Association are indeed fortunate to bring together
seminal thinkers in the five social disciplines
with breadth of experience in applying social theory
to assess the directions of a post disciplinary
social science, with the United Arab Emirates as
the case study. This country is among the most
innovative and fastest growing social nodes of
the new global order. It is only appropriate that
this fast-growing and forward-looking country host
the convocation of some of the most eminent social
scientists to reflect on all various manifestations
of this unique society grounded in traditionalism
and yet so attuned to global trends and its contributions
to the social sciences.
In this sense,
the conference, which brings together scholars
from Harvard, UC Berkeley, the London School
of Economics, the University of Chicago, the
University of Exeter, Durham University, the
American University of Beirut, the American University
of Cairo, the University of Kuwait, Columbia University,
the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, the
University of Geneva, and Georgetown University
among others, addresses the vision put forth by
his Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Muhammed Al
Qassimi, and the mission that he ascribed to AUS
of becoming an eminent “center of research
for educational development and the solution of
social problems.”
Dr. Nada Mourtada-Sabbah
Journal of Social Affairs
Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Conference Director
American University of Sharjah |
Dr. Mohammed
Al Mutawa
Journal of Social Affairs
Editor-in-Chief
Conference Director
Sociological Association |
