Beyond Erasure and Profiling: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland

This report captures the conditions and experiences of Arab Americans in the Chicagoland area. The report uses demographic research, surveys, focus group data, as well as expert commentaries by organizers and academics to analyze how systemic inequities and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism affect the lives of Arab Americans in employment, education, health care, housing, and policing. The report engages with the diversity of experiences among Arab American communities and their common challenge in navigating being at once hypervisible as a result of commonplace stereotypes as well as invisible due to being classified as white by government agencies and due to the general lack of knowledge about Arab Americans in our society

Interrogating Lebanese Heteronormativity: Family, Adulthood, and Citizenship

Conference panel titled "Anthropological Approaches to Queer and Sexuality Studies in the Middle East and North Africa

Desirable Masculinity/Femininity and Nostalgia of the "Anti-Modern": Bab el-Hara Television Series as a Site of Production

Manuscript Draft. Contains Arabic illustrationVarying manifestations of masculinity and femininity are often on display in various forms of popular culture. The following essay will analyze the kinds of desires and commentaries on social issues and family ties that Bab el-Hara, a Syrian television series, evokes. It argues that through evoking a sense of nostalgia for a "mythic" past, it links between a nationalist desirable masculine 'anti-modernity' and particular desires around family relations, femininity, and women. Despite contradicting some of the stated desires among audiences, these manufactured desires find broad appeal in the political context of the Arab world today. This phenomenon--that such a show and its representations strike a strong chord across the region--fosters commentary on the difficult current positions of women's rights struggles in the contemporary gender politics of the region. I argue that the show promotes an 'anti-modern' masculinity capable of delivering justice on the national front. In so doing, it also erodes the possibility of a gender justice future. In this paper, I will first address the relationship between the national and popular media, discuss patriarchy, family relations, femininity, and masculinity, showcasing ideal notions of masculinity as anti-modern. I then analyze notions of nostalgia of an ideal state, family, and masculinity/manhood in comparison and contrast to the current failures of the nation/state to deliver. This leads into a conclusion commenting on the political and social transformations in the Arab world in 2011 and the challenges ahead for not only political change but social change that supports women's equality

Epidemiology, clinical manifestations, and molecular typing of salmonella typhi isolated from patients with typhoid fever in Lebanon

The objective of this study was to examine the epidemiology and the clinical manifestations of typhoid fever as well as the susceptibility and strain relatedness of Salmonella typhi isolates in Lebanon from 2006 to 2007. A total of 120 patients with typhoid fever were initially identified from various areas of the country based on positive culture results for S. typhi from blood, urine, stools, bone marrow and/or positive serology. Clinical, microbiological and molecular analysis was performed on cases with complete data available. These results indicated that drinking water was an unlikely mode of transmission of the infection. Despite increasing reports of antimicrobial resistance among S. typhi isolates, the vast majority of these isolates were susceptible to various antibiotic agents, including ampicillin, cephalosporins, quinolones, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole. Molecular analysis of the isolates revealed a predominance of one single genotype with no variation in distribution across the geographical regions