Ahmed Kanna
PhD, Harvard University, 2006
AM, Harvard University, 2000
BS, James Madison University, 1997
I bring an internationalist perspective to my teaching in anthropology, ethnic studies, and international studies. I see the United States as part of larger global histories, sociocultural geographies, and political – economic dynamics. As an anthropologist, I strive to also bring to the classroom a deep curiosity about cultural diversity and the diversity of human ways of social life going back to our origins as a species. Some of the "big questions" that inform my teaching are: what are origins and histories of our ideas and practices of gender, race, and class? How do we think critically when presented with facile stories about “human nature” in the popular and news media, on social media, etc.? How might we connect our individual experiences to these larger questions and how might we draw upon our knowledge to initiate or deepen our democratic participation? I see the classroom as a meeting place for many voices and perspectives and I find students’ participation and sharing of their experiences the most exciting part of teaching.
My first major research project was on the politics of globalization, urbanism, and cultural and national identity in the Arab/Persian Gulf region. This culminated in numerous publications, including Dubai, The City as Corporation (2011, University of Minnesota Press), which was excerpted in the 2014 Routledge Cities of the Global South Reader, edited by Faranak Miraftab and Neema Kudva. The book was also listed as an “essential reading on the Arab state” by Jadaliyya. My other books include Rethinking Global Urbanism (Routledge; co-written with my Trinity College colleague, the distinguished sociologist Xiangming Chen); The Superlative City (2013, Harvard UP); and Beyond Exception: New Ethnographies of the Arabian Peninsula (2020, Cornell UP, co-written with Neha Vora and Amélie Le Renard). My articles engaging these and other urban anthropological questions have appeared in City, Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jadaliyya, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Society & Space, among others. More recently, I’ve turned my attention to the question of how social movement participants and social justice activists in the US and in Germany generate social theory through their situated knowledges in struggles for economic and immigrant justice and for a democratic, multiracial and multicultural horizon. My publications on the latter topics have appeared in Monthly Review, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and others, and I have presented papers based on this research at flagship disciplinary and more specialized conferences and at major research universities. I am currently working on a book-length project on the German left and collective memories of socialism in a time of international and geopolitical transition.
