MECAM Fellows’ Study Day: Confronting Asymmetries in the Maghreb
The Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) is pleased to invite you to its Fellows’ Study Day, themed ” Confronting Asymmetries in the Maghreb,” taking place on 5 December 2025 in Tunis.
This study day brings together MECAM fellows from diverse academic backgrounds to explore how power imbalances—historical, social, gendered, and political—are embedded, reproduced, and re-imagined in the Maghreb and beyond. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the discussions trace how these asymmetries disrupt and generate new forms of meaning, agency, and solidarity.
Panel I – Examining Songs, Rituals, and Musical Repertoires and their Asymmetric Representations in Africa and the Maghreb
At the intersection of ethno-musicology, gender studies, and anthropological linguistics, the first panel investigates how traditional repertoires—such as Stambeli music in Tunisia, Amazigh/Berber repertoires, and other musical practices across the Maghreb and West Africa—mediate social mobility, exclusion, and gendered identity. These practices serve not only as cultural heritage, but also as lively sites where bodily, spiritual, and social hierarchies are negotiated, challenged, and reworked.
Panel II – Reckoning with Historical Asymmetries in the Maghreb: Cultural, Spiritual, and Political Discursive Interventions
The second panel draws from spiritual, political, and artistic domains to examine how crises—colonial and postcolonial, migratory and institutional—are contested and reinterpreted. Through discursive interventions in Sufi hermeneutics, socially engaged art, border-migration narratives, and psychiatric institutions, the participants foreground how the asymmetries of power and meaning shape collective life, alienation, and resistance.
Panel III – Historical Asymmetries and State-Building in the Maghreb
The third panel turns to the historical dimensions of power in state-building. By probing epistemic, legal, and political asymmetries, from colonial legal frameworks to the conceptualization of a “Muslim state”, the panel investigates the negotiations of these dimensions of power since independence. Case studies on mid-twentieth-century Morocco and Algeria illuminate the influence of unequal power relations, both internal and global, on national identities and institutional trajectories.
Taken together, these three panels articulate a multifaceted understanding of asymmetries in the Maghreb—one that spans embodied ritual, interpretive politics, and institutional history. By exploring the production of traditions and discourses of transformation, the study day explores ” how confronting asymmetries in the Maghreb” opens sites of creative possibility, re-connection, and redefinition.
Publication Workshop
The study day will also feature a joint publication workshop focused on choosing and framing a topic for an article. This session will offer practical perspectives on the key differences between a MECAM working paper and a peer-reviewed journal article in terms of format and framing. The workshop aims to guide the fellows in selecting and framing effective topic choices and argument development, while providing insights on how to adapt research for different publication contexts and audiences.
Venue
MECAM – (HIDE) 27, rue Florian – Borj Zouara (Bab Saadoun), Tunis
Program
Program link