This Arab Life: A Generation's Journey into Silence
This Arab Life is an intimate and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation’s descent into silence. Personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of the unremitting mire that anticipates the region's present-day chaos. The memoir begins in Amman in the Summer of 1973, and concludes in Beirut in December 2021.
This event features Kate Seeley and Tareq Baconi in conversation with the author, Amal Ghandour. Join us as they discuss personal, social, and political themes connected to the book's narrative that encompasses a world by turns distant and faded, near and vital.
Speakers
Amal Ghandour is an author (About This Man Called Ali and This Arab Life, A Generation’s Journey Into Silence) and a blogger (Thinking Fits, This Arab Life). Her career spans more than three decades in the fields of research, communication, and community development. Since 2009, she has held the position of Senior Strategy Adviser to Ruwwad al Tanmeyah, a regional community development initiative.
Ghandour was special adviser to Columbia Global Centers | Amman from 2014 to 2017 and sits on the Women Creating Change Leadership Council of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. She serves on the Board of Trustees of International College and has also served on the Board of Directors of Ruwwad, Lebanon and the Arab Human Rights Fund.
Ghandour holds an MS in International Policy from Stanford University and a BSFS from Georgetown University.
Tareq Baconi is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The Baffler, the Nation, the Washington Post, among others.
Tareq serves as president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies, and co-founder of Makan. Tareq is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah.
Kate Seelye is senior vice president at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she oversees many aspects of the institution's development and growth. Prior to joining MEI in 2009, Seelye worked as a radio and television journalist covering the Arab world from 2000-2009 from her base in Beirut, Lebanon. She reported on the region for National Public Radio, the PRI/BBC show, The World, the PBS documentary show, Frontline/World, and the Channel Four British investigative television news series, Unreported World.
Seelye was a producer for the PBS Newshour, based in Los Angeles, after starting her journalism career at the award-winning business program, Marketplace Radio.