NYUAD Institute

At a moment when we are confronted by the changing nature and conditions of borders and borderlands, can the performing arts serve as a catalyst for (re)imagining current border logics, shaped not only by long-standing territorial and political disputes but also by the effects of globalization? This panel engages with the meaning of borders not only as physical sites of conflict and contestation b...

According to surveys conducted by Gallup, 750 million people would migrate to another country if they could. This talk explores how migration on this scale is impossible under existing laws and international agreements. Discussions about new political arrangements that could accommodate this many migrants typically presume that they will support (i) Large Scale Immigration, (ii) Equal Treatment un...

November 8, 2020 In 2019 it was estimated that more than 20 billion internet-of-things (IoT) devices were active around the world. This includes all computational devices capable of holding and processing personal data, such as smartphones, fitness trackers, smart bulbs, cleaning robots, etc. The wealth of data collected and processed by IoT devices raises questions about privacy since much of the...

November 22, 2020 It could be argued that mathematics was born with the purpose of making sense of nature's patterns. The mathematics of simple and regular shapes was developed first, and with great success, so much so that predictable regularity and mathematics have become somewhat synonymous in common speech. But, unbeknownst to most of the general public, mathematicians have long been working a...

November 10, 2020 Globalization has been the most progressive force in the history of humanity, bringing more progress, more quickly, to more people than anything preceding it. And yet, globalization appears more unpopular than ever as it leads to more risks. COVID-19 will not kill globalization; on the contrary it will accelerate its growth and transformation. Globalization will increasingly be c...

November 16, 2020 Part of "Art and Power in the Middle East: Past and Present" In Syria media creators have manipulated a limited, ambiguous autonomy to produce a thriving transnational television drama industry—one that has survived by responding to, and often challenging, the very conditions that have generated and sustained it. This talk explores the political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions...

November 18, 2020 Monuments commemorate moments or figures of public victory or sorrow. Some protect significant lands or mark noteworthy geographic features. Most have historically tended to foreground the human species and to avoid sticky subjects and non-dominant histories, including the histories of other species. This panel explores multispecies monuments to the Anthropocene, to the techno-hu...

December 7, 2020 In this talk, Enass Khansa examines both the meaning and application of justice in The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah). She shows that the opening story, or frame tale, as well as the two immediately following stories, "The Merchant and the Genie" and "The Fisherman and the ‘Ifrīt," engage in a cohesive debate about the coincidence of successful interpretation and j...

October 6, 2020 Freshwater is vital for human and environmental health, industrial activities and food production, the production and use of energy, and much more. As human populations and economies grow, pressure on limited water resources are also growing, leading to a variety of challenging problems, including water scarcity and pollution, water-related diseases, ecological disruptions, and eve...

September 22, 2020 Muslims have been familiar with infectious disease since the time of the Prophet in the seventh century. This talk reviews the diversity of Muslim views on contagion and plague within the context of Islamic law, Sufism, and medicine. What did Muslim scholars say about how one should respond to the challenge of a pandemic, how did Muslims actually respond, and how do we know? The...

September 29, 2020 Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury is known for her genre-bending interactive live artworks performed in unique spaces and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. El Khoury discusses her latest micro-theater work, As Far as Isolation Goes (Online), which explores the mental health of asylum seekers through one-on-one zoom performances, as well as othe...

October 4, 2020 Award-winning author and journalist Charles Siebert discusses his many experiences visiting with, and writing about, non-human animals, and what they reveal to us about themselves and us. Through his interludes with everyone from a former cellist in an all-chimpanzee circus orchestra; to an octopus escape artist; to elephant and whale ventriloquists; to traumatized orphaned parrots...

October 20, 2020 Donald Trump was elected in 2016 riding a wave of global populism. His first term has marked a turn toward isolationism, nationalism, and attacks on domestic and international institutions. How will the COVID-19 epidemic and racial protests in the US affect the outcome of the upcoming US election, and what implications will this have for geopolitics? Speaker Francis Fukuyama, Oliv...

September 27, 2020 Nearly half of Muslim Americans never attend the mosque and have very few Muslim friends. How and why does “unmosquing” happen and to whom? Eman Abdelhadi traces second-generation immigrants’ engagement with Muslim communities using life history interviews and presents four trajectories that emerge from these data. Abdelhadi finds that while most Muslim Americans are heavily emb...

2019.10.30 Our oceans are becoming increasingly acidic as a result of rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Simultaneously, more than 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions is absorbed by the world’s oceans. As they warm up, oceans lose oxygen, essential for marine life. Together, these effects amplify one another and put marine species and ecosystems under great...

2019.10.22 Shadow play, known as khayāl al-ẓill, karagöz, or li‘b, is a performing art with a long and rich history in the Arab world. Like Aladdin’s magic lamp that transforms the real world into a fantasy land, the shadow master’s lantern projects fairytales and spectacles with intricate, cartoonish figures onto a screen for enchanted audiences to enjoy. This talk surveys this enduring tradition...

2019.11.03 Our national discourse has become increasingly toxic, irrational, self-absorbed; our leaders and our citizens suffer from an allergy to nuance and complexity. In his new book, Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age, John Sexton, NYU president from 2002 to 2015, argues that universities must make the fight against this "secular dogmatism" central to their missions. In conv...

2019.11.11 A mysterious cluster of over 500 buildings constructed almost entirely from coral, Jezirat Al Hamra, Ras Al Khaimah is a coastal village that was abandoned over half a century ago. This talk traces the evolution of this community, which represents a unique archaeological and architectural asset for the Emirates, into the future, and examines the practice of coral masonry. Using geochemi...

2019.11.17 Gordon Moore observed that the number of circuits that can be placed on a computer chip doubles every two years. His observation, dubbed Moore’s Law, has served the electronics industry well. In recent years, however, progress has been curtailed by delays in the release of new technologies, skyrocketing chip development costs, and rapidly approaching physical limits. While this may seem...

2019.04.18 The great Punjabi writer Nanak Singh was present at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 and twenty-two years old at the time. As the British troops opened fire on the unarmed gathering protesting against Rowlatt Act, killing hundreds, Nanak Singh fainted and his unconscious body was piled up among the corpses. After going through the traumatic experience, he proceeded to write Khooni Vais...

2019.09.10 The story of child refugees alone on the highways of Europe originally appeared as newspaper reportage, was reconceived as the fiction work “Hinterland” by Caroline Brothers, and then adapted by Scottish theater company Vox Motus into “Flight,” a groundbreaking, award-winning theatrical work. In this talk, Brothers shares her experience of the story’s double adaptation. What considerati...

2019.09.22 What fuels radicalization to violence? Is de-radicalization a possibility? How can societies build sustainable peace and reinforce people’s commitment to coexist in harmony? Based on rare field research with terrorists spanning the ideological spectrum, The Three Pillars of Radicalization explores the drivers of radicalization. Evidence collected across the globe suggests that when conj...

2019.09.17 Many of our contemporaries are only aware of climate change through public discourse and social media. Drawing on recent scientific papers, Jeffrey Reimer shows how the atmosphere is changing, that humans are the cause, and that there are consequences. Such consequences may be viewed in the context of Earth's historical carbon cycles, which demonstrate well what the Earth will look like...

2019.09.25 This presentation reviews five years of research conducted at NYU Abu Dhabi exploring the cross-cultural practices and understanding of musical rhythm. Three previously held workshops bringing together experts from musicology, computational modeling, cognition, and neuroscience informed the formation of a large corpus of music from the region, machine learning techniques that can analyz...

2019.09.30 It is more than three years since the British people voted to leave the European Union (EU), which it is set to do on October 31. If it does so without a deal then this will have serious economic and political repercussions throughout Europe, but especially in Britain. How did we get here? This talk explores how the separate but interwoven histories of Britain, Ireland, and the rest of...