CBRL Sound

In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Eman Shahin and Alice Lubbock about the BIRI Project Women Transcending Boundaries, a project that uncovers the intertwined lives of women who shaped archaeology and heritage work across many regions. Using the archives of the British International Research Institutes (BIRI), they trace how letters, photographs, field notes...

In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Robert Bewley and Firas Bqa’in about their recent field visit to newly identified Roman camps in Jordan’s Eastern Desert. Supported by the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan (AAJ) project and in collaboration with EAMENA, they discuss the process of documenting these sites from aerial photography to on-the-ground surveys, the disc...

LEARNING FROM THE LEVANT - Episode 9: Mayyada Wazaify and Jenny Scott In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Dr Jenny Scott and Prof Mayyada Wazaify about the two-day workshop on “Co-Development of an Academic Network and Research Prioritisation Exercise to Study the Role of Pharmacies and Pharmacists in Substance Use Disorders in Jordan,” held at the CBRL Amman...

LEARNING FROM THE LEVANT - Episode 8: Olivia Mason and Gazua Alaun In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with photographer Gazua Elaun and political geographer Olivia Mason about their bilingual book Shifting Grounds: Bedouin Cultural Heritage in Jordan’s Badia. The conversation explores how the book documents living, often overlooked forms of Bedouin cultural herita...

LEARNING FROM THE LEVANT - Episode 7: Gerasimos Tsourapas and Imad El-Anis In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Professor Gerasimos Tsourapas and Dr. Imad El-Anis about their work on “eco-humanitarian rentierism.” They explore how countries like Jordan and Egypt navigate the combined pressures of climate change and refugee influxes, and how these challenges sha...

LEARNING FROM THE LEVANT - Episode 6: Jamie Fraser In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Dr. Jamie Fraser, Director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem. They explore the world of the Bronze Age Levant, Dr. Fraser’s discoveries at Khirbet Um al-Ghozlan, an Early Bronze Age olive oil factory in Jordan, and what these findin...

LEARNING FROM THE LEVANT - Episode 5: Carmen Ting In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Dr. Carmen Ting, an archaeologist specialising in materials analysis and ancient technologies. Dr. Ting directs several projects on the emergence and spread of medieval glazed tableware across the Levant, Islamic lands, and Central Asia. She also develops innovative non-invas...

Learning from the Levant Episode 4: Yasir Suleiman In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Professor Yasir Suleiman about the deep connections between language, identity, and place in the Arab world. They explore how Jerusalem’s street signs reveal stories of power and resistance, why Arabic holds such symbolic importance, and how cities ‘speak’ through their lang...

Learning from the Levant Episode 3: Muhyi Majeed In this episode of Learning from the Levant, Shatha Mubaideen speaks with Muhyi Majeed, a peer researcher in the Reconfiguring Heritage project. Muhyi discusses how participatory methods such as photovoice and embodied storytelling can help young people reclaim and reimagine their cultural heritage. They reflect on the power of everyday memory, the...

Learning from the Levant Episode 2: Shaddin Almasri In this episode of Learning from the Levant, host Shatha Mubaideen welcomes Dr. Shaddin, a Research Fellow at CBRL and postdoctoral researcher at Danube University Krems. Shaddin’s research focuses on inequalities between refugee and migrant groups, particularly in the SWANA and East Africa regions. Together, they discuss the evolving refugee pol...

Learning from the Levant Episode 1: Jane Humphris In this first episode of Learning from the Levant, a Podcast Series by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), Shatha Mubaideen hosts Dr Jane Humphris, CBRL Director. Together, they discuss Dr Humphris' career in archaeology, her new role at CBRL, and the organisation’s mission to promote interdisciplinary research and cultural herit...

Jerusalem: From Arab world metropolis to divided city Dr Mansour Nasasra shares his insights into the complex history of Jerusalem. He looks back to the British occupation of the city by General Edmund Allenby in 1917 and the unstable years that followed, the division of the city in 1948 between Israel and Jordan and Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day war. He recalls how Jerusa...

In recent years, the illicit amphetamine-like drug Captagon (Fenethylline) has become a major concern in the Middle East – both as a source of addiction and due to its connection with terrorism and the armed groups who produce and traffic it. This presentation will provide an overview on the findings of a qualitative study about the impact of Captagon on Jordan by focusing on its relationship to o...

The fourth episode in the Kashmir Palestine Conversation Series addresses “Poetry and literature” and feature short presentations from Dalia Taha (poet and playwright) and Ather Zia (poet and writer, University of Colorado). The chair is Nadine El-Enany (Birkbeck, University of London) About the speakers Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright living in Ramallah. Her first play Keffiyeh/Ma...

In this webinar, the project partners share insights from the 2021/22 FIELD SONGS project, an AHRC-funded collaboration of agricultural and social scientists at the University of Edinburgh and Douzan Art & Culture and Syrian Academic Expertise, two Syrian-run organisations based in Turkey. For this project, the partners documented refugees’ intangible agricultural heritage and present-day working...

This is the third in our Kashmir Palestine Conversation Series which features short presentations from Ala Al Azzeh (Birzeit University) and Inshah Malik, and was be moderated by Virinder Kalra (University of Warwick).

The first Kashmir-Palestine Conversation will feature a screening of the film “Bring Him Back” (dir. Fahad Shah, 2015), followed by a discussion with Palestinian academic Suhad Daher-Nashif and filmmaker Talat Bhat. Bring him Back is a documentary film about the struggle of Maqbool Bhat’s mother to get her son’s mortal remains back from Tihar jail of India. It is directed by Kashmiri journalist an...

Palestine and Kashmir are two of the most longstanding unresolved geopolitical puzzles resulting from the end of the British Empire. They share an unenviable list of commonalities in their historical conditions: from the legacies and vestiges of British colonial partition, to the large refugee populations and extensive diasporas they produced. Their struggles for national self-determination are al...

We are joined by Professor Hughes in the third event of our series of events to mark the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-48). Professor Hughes will use material from his recent book on Britain’s repression of the Arab revolt in the 1930s to detail Britain’s devastatingly effective methods against colonial rebellion. The British army had a long tradition of pacification that it...

When an earthquake shook Palestine, Transjordan and the south of Lebanon and Syria in 1927, terms such as the Richter scale or plate tectonics which we now use to talk about seismic events were still a thing of the future. In global science, scholars were debating what caused earthquakes and were trying to work out how to measure their power and impacts. This lecture looks at how local scientists,...

In this talk Dr Muna Dajani will look at how a unified watershed governance was devised by external powers, mainly the British and Americans, to construct the water resources of the Jordan River Basin as a unified, apolitical and ‘natural’ watershed. In their attempt to depoliticise the boundaries of the watershed, these forces reinforced a particular worldview that considered natural resources as...

This talk considers British involvement in and attitudes towards Palestine during the so-called “Peaceful Crusade” of the nineteenth century. Polly presents aspects of his book Palestine in the Victorian Age, arguing that Britain’s occupation, and the Zionist movement’s settler-colonisation, were significantly prefigured by Victorian Britons. Drawing on Evangelical Christian discourses around the...

In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Maps divide the walled Old City into four quarters, yet that division doesn’t reflect the reality of mixed and diverse neighbourhoods. Beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, much of the Old City remains little known to visitors, its people overlooked and their stories untold. This webinar highlights voices of...

Rebel populism tells the story of the Syrian uprising through the eyes of migrant workers in Beirut. Workers from Syria have maintained a presence in Lebanon for decades. There was a time when their wages stretched further back home. However, from the mid-2000s, liberalising reforms saw accelerating levels of poverty. Migration shifted from an ‘opportunity’ to a survivalist strategy.  But in 2011,...

CBRL & EAMENA webinar: Digital mapping, heritage management and archaeological research in the Levant: synergism and future directions Archaeology has undergone a digital revolution that has transformed working practices across the globe and hugely increased the amount of data available for research. Many initiatives exist that try to organise and make sense of the influx of data, further contribu...