MENAR Impact Report

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To celebrate the 10th anniversary of MENAR’s founding, as well as the wind-down of its formal operations, we commissioned an Impact Report (written by two of our alumni) to document the program’s achievements. This report tells the story of our fellows and our partner organizations, and the impact they have had on the communities where our fellows have worked. We are extremely proud to share it with the public and hope that you will enjoy reading it. Please click on the image below to access the report.

Alumnus featured on MIT website!

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MENAR Fellowship Program alumnus Timothy Loh, now a second-year PhD student at MIT, was recently featured in a profile on MIT’s website. He is studying deafness, sign language, and technology in the Middle East. Timothy was a MENAR fellow at the Collateral Repair Project in Amman, Jordan in 2016-2017.

Read the article here:

Uncovering the role of technology and medicine in deaf and signing worlds
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

 

“Last summer, when I was doing fieldwork, one of my deaf friends asked me straight up, ‘How does your work benefit the deaf community in Jordan?’ That’s a fair question. I told him I am still thinking about this. It’s an important question to answer well. How do anthropologists give back to the community that we’re learning from?

“I think for many anthropologists, we hope that our work can ‘speak truth to power,’ to resist and complicate simplistic and hegemonic narratives, like the idea that technology can provide technical solutions for political problems. I do hope that my research can eventually inform policymaking for people in the Middle East whose voices need to be heard.”