Academics from around the world, including Australia, Turkey, California and Western Canada, converged on Hanover to participate in "The Gaze & The Veil: Surveillance and the Legacies of Orientalism," a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation and convened by Professor Susannah Heschel last weekend. The event brought together academics from disciplines ranging from law and philosophy to psychiatry to discuss both historical and contemporary views of Eastern culture and issues of suppression through surveillance.
Heschel, a professor in the religion department, said that her interest in "layers of surveillance" in different societies and cultures helped spark the idea for the conference. Heschel cited Manhattan, where a camera system called the "surveillance veil" was recently installed, as one contemporary example of surveillance,
"You walk down the street in a residential neighborhood and there are cameras everywhere," Heschel said. "It's a very spooky feeling."
Orientalism is characterized as a historically based collection of biased or cliche perceptions of the East and often Islamic culture by the West. The gaze and veil mentioned in the title of the conference represent this perception and its literal and metaphorical covers.
The conference also addressed the lack of an Islamic studies department at the College and the limited number of courses related to this subject.
"I am trying, in a sense, to beef up our curriculum," Heschel said.
The different "gazes," or perspectives of each attending scholar appeared in the varying topics addressed throughout the conference.
"For your Security: Policing and State Advertising in Contemporary Morocco," a presentation by Jonathan Smolin, a professor in Dartmouth's Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literature department, depicted the current Moroccan trend of promoting fictional crime dramas -- a new form of entertainment for Morocco and a genre unheard of in the Arab world -- to improve relations between citizens and Moroccan police forces. The hope is that the citizens will begin to police themselves and feel comfortable sharing what they find with the real police, Smolin said.
Steve Vladeck of the American University Law School presented his paper "Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld: The Separation of Powers and the Marginalization of Individual Rights," a work which examines the debate over the post-Sept. 11, 2001 behavior of the Bush administration and the relationship between government power and individual rights. Vladeck said these two forces are now seem as "counterweights" rather than reinforcing factors.
Another presentation followed the rise of the Rastafari movement in Eastern Jamaica, a society "under surveillance" by British officials during the early 1900s. Charles Price, an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina, said the growth of the movement was a result of the society's oppression by the British authorities, as chronicled through news headlines of the 1900s.
Adnan Husain of Queen's University, examined historical Muslim identity and contemporary Muslim self-images in his work "The Muslim Question: Mediterranean History and the Surveillance of Difference,"
"We have intersections of race, religion and culture which are very difficult to untangle," Husain said during the presentation of his work.
Although the conference's events were dominated by the involved academics, several students also attended the conference. During one event, a member of the Class of 2008 said that the conference made her understand the excitement behind academics.
Heschel, who specializes in Jewish studies, added that the conference gave her an opportunity to widen her academic perspective.
"I thought it would be wonderful to bring together scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies, a collaboration that rarely occurs," she said.
Heschel highlighted the wide-ranging backgrounds of the event's attendees.
"The fact is that people came from many different disciplines for this conference, and that was important," she said.
Many of the professors who participated said that the conference had been educational, noting the wide range of participating disciplines.
"It was even more stimulating than I expected it would be." Husain said. "On the face of it, the very different approaches seemed as if maybe there wouldn't be something coherent that everyone could engage with, but the presentations brought out a lot of connections, on both surveillance and its connection to legacies of Orientalism."
The weekend's conference was the fifth conference convened by Heschel using funding from the Ford Foundation.
