Some of the world’s most distinguished experts in the fields of culture, politics, and Islamic law and history will be among an array of global scholars participating in Georgetown University in Qatar’s (GU-Q)  ‘Scapes of Power’ conference starting from today.
The two-day conference is organised to celebrate the university’s 10 year anniversary in Doha. Dr Laura Doyle, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Dr. Sherman Jackson, from the University of Southern California, and Dr John Esposito, from Georgetown University in Washington DC, will be featured at the public conference, recognising a decade of academic and research excellence of GU-Q.
While scholars often attend conferences in their chosen fields, this anniversary conference will uniquely bring together a wide variety of specialists-from historians, to economists, to sociologists and more-to discuss a concept that invariably connects all the various academic disciplines.
What is power? How is it exercised and by whom? What changes over space and time? These are the central questions that will be the highlight of the lively and engaging two-day public forum.
Each day of the conference will be launched with a lecture from a different keynote speaker.
The first day will feature Dr Laura Doyle, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who will present “Inter-imperial Powerscapes”.
The prolific author and co-director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, which seeks to foster scholarship and teaching informed by non-eurocentric world history, will appraise how empires operate as co-operative units, and as such, influence a global environment, rather than focusing solely on empire as the specific areas of a state’s national interests.
Named among the top 500 most influential Muslims in the world by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Dr Sherman Jackson, a professor at the University of Southern California, will present the second keynote address of the conference.
His presentation, “Islam and Power: Between Shari’ah and the Islamic Secular”, will launch an important panel discussion titled “Muslims in a Global Perspective”.
The conference will also include an array of topics spanning history from ancient Rome to modern China, as well as charting the globe from Latin America to Europe, Africa and Asia.