The 2027 Arab American Studies Association Triennial Conference: Arab American Studies as Practice: Working With Our Communities will be held on April 8-11 at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
The 2027 Arab American Studies Association Triennial Conference invites scholars, activists, artists, and community practitioners to join us in Dearborn at the Arab American National Museum to reflect on Arab American studies as both a field of inquiry and a collective practice of relation, accountability, and survival. We understand Arab American studies not as a bounded or static academic area, but as an evolving formation shaped by the material conditions, histories, and struggles of the communities from which it emerges and to which it remains responsible. Arab American studies is a living, relational practice: a mode of knowledge production and circulation grounded in shared authority, reciprocal exchange, and reflective practice among Arab, SWANA, and diasporic communities and the scholars committed to learning and working alongside them.
This conference asks what it means to take that understanding seriously. What kinds of scholarship, collaboration, institution-building, and public work become possible when Arab American studies works with rather than on or about communities? How might the field more fully rethink its methods of knowledge production, its publics, its forms of authority, and its responsibilities in the present? We invite contributions that explore the ethical, political, and methodological stakes of community-engaged research and scholarship, and that foreground the collective practices through which Arab, SWANA, and diasporic communities navigate, resist, and survive the violences of our time.
Arab American studies has long been shaped by transnational feminist praxis that calls for sustained engagement with the communities it studies. We use community capaciously: not only to name people in place, but also the solidarities forged through organizing, cultural work, language, memory, care, movement, and struggle. Community may take the form of research partnerships, oral history projects, collaborative archives, public humanities, policy work, translation, pedagogy, artistic production, performance, mutual aid, coalition, or cross-movement work linking Arab American studies to Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latino, Muslim, SWANA, queer, and other diasporic and decolonial formations. We welcome proposals that examine such practices critically, as well as work that theorizes, historicizes, documents, or challenges them.
During times of escalating crisis and precarity – times when our campuses and neighborhoods are under assault, when our peers and students are being detained, when our homelands continue to confront genocide, displacement, and catastrophic violence – we are called upon to strengthen the community bonds we have nurtured for decades and forge new ones. When it is hard to think, hard to organize, hard to breathe, we are challenged to imagine new ways to engage and to work together. Arab American studies must ask what forms of knowledge, solidarity, and institutional practice this moment demands, what kinds of knowledge the field is uniquely positioned to make possible, and what futures it might help build in collaboration with our communities. As noted in the introduction to Sajjlu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies, Arab American studies is “living, breathing, and constantly evolving.” This violence will change us. We therefore invite work that not only responds to the present but helps define what Arab American studies should become: what it should value, whom it should serve, how it should be practiced, and what responsibilities it should claim.
We invite our peers in higher education who have long practiced community-engaged research to come forward and share their work. We invite artists, activists, and community practitioners who have always worked in community, but may never have used the academy’s language to describe it. We invite people for whom this work is entirely new. We encourage collaborative submissions between scholars, community organizers, artists, and researchers; work that challenges traditional academic formats and centers community voices; and contributions that help us think more broadly about Arab American studies as a field in formation: its methods, infrastructures, publics, responsibilities, and futures. We welcome achievements, but also failures, experiments, tensions, and works in progress, because the future of the field will be shaped through collective reflection on how we learn, build, and struggle together.
We invite proposals from faculty, students, independent scholars, healthcare workers, artists, writers, translators, librarians, archivists, educators, organizers, practitioners, community members, and everyone between. Proposals may include roundtable conversations, papers, teaching exercises, think pieces, and other presentations on community-engaged Arab American studies. Proposals need not fit the theme narrowly, and all are welcome to apply. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Community-based and participatory research methodologies
- Health and wellness work with Arab American nurses and physicians
- Arab American lawyers and legal aid
- Social work in Arab America
- Oral history, memory work, and community archives
- Public humanities and Arab American cultural institutions
- Arab American, SWANA, woman of color feminisms, womanisms, and activisms
- Mutual aid, care networks, and community survival strategies
- Artistic and literary production as community knowledge
- Teaching Arab American studies in and beyond the classroom (including community colleges, K-12)
- Scholar-activism and questions of positionality and accountability
- Transnational solidarities
- Digital communities, media, and diasporic storytelling
- Business and entrepreneurship partnerships in Arab America
- Ethical research challenges: extraction, representation, and institutional constraints
- ICE surveillance and detention and community responses and responder networks
- Environmental advocacy, activisms, and cultural production
- Institutional conditions that enable or constrain Arab American studies
- Universities as political, economic, and geopolitical institutions
- How Arab American faculty and students are working in collaboration with communities in the streets in responses to crises at home and in the region
The deadline for proposal submission is September 1, 2026. Please submit proposals to secretary@arabamericanstudies.org.
