Where do we stand today after decades of reflecting on prevailing and changing knowledge hierarchies and circulations? From the perspective of the Arab region, this presentation will discuss geographies of knowledge production on two levels: conceptual and infrastructural. Conceptually what is the promise of recent deliberations on decentering, globalizing and decolonizating knowledge? What kinds of infrastructures of research, teaching and publishing are implicated in such conceptual agendas? What emergent geographies of knowledge can we discern that transcend prevailing categories of East, West, North and South?

Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences since 2012 and also Program Director at the Social Science Research Council since 1999. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. After teaching at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the Population Council in Cairo. In 1999, she joined the SSRC in New York as program director for the programs on InterAsia (currently), the Middle East and North Africa (currently) and Eurasia (until 2010).  Her latest publication is Seeing the World: How US Universities make Knowledge in a Global Era (co-authored with Mitchell Stephens and Cynthia Miller-Idriss) Princeton University Press 2018.