My partnership with the Institute Superieur des Sciences Humaines at the University of Tunis al-Manar, the highest ranking university in Tunisia and its Director, Mohsen Elkhouni, aims at helping the Humanities Institute train their graduate students. In 2018, this led to a study day focused on Critical Thinking and the Tunisian University, attended by forty students.

More broadly, my partnership with the University of Tunis al-Manar has also led to initiatives which aim to explore new forms of governance, new imaginations of the post-revolutionary political future, through a committed approach to the humanities. So far, this initiative has led to the organisation of two study days concerning Carthage and Kairaounae. The first of these, “Carthage: Memory and Place” (Qartaj: al-Dhakira wa-l-Makan) was held in April 2019. The second, “Kairouan: Memory and Place” (Qayrawan: al-Dhakira wa-l-Makan) was held in October 2019. Both were supported financially by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and ISSH.

In both study days, we were pedagogically committed to taking academia outside of the classroom and the university, to applying our academic insights to the world around us. In particular, we sought to pursue academic learning interactively through an explicitly multidiciplinary and interdisciplinary approach. Here, you can read some of the reviews left by students.

The study day on Carthage has been covered in two short films, which you can watch below. The first summarises the day, whilst the second is a recording of my talk, “Whose Carthage? The Contested Memory of the Place and its History”. In my talk, I explore the ways in which Carthage, as both historical site and part of modern Tunisia, became an important battleground in the colonial vs. indigenous imagination of Tunisian space over the last two centuries. You can read further thoughts of mine on this issue here.

Videos from the Carthage Study Day: