Status Audio Magazine

Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine. Bassam is Co-Project Manager for the Salon Syria Project. Twitter: @4Bassam 

Nadya Sbaiti specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Gender, Education, and Nation in Mandate Lebanon," (forthcoming), which examines the central role of education to the formation of multiple national narratives and the production of history in Lebanon under French mandate.

Additional research interests include spatial manifestations of colonial and national projects, colonial methods of social control through prisons and asylums, the production of history as both discursive and material practice, tourism and heritage, and contemporary popular culture (music, film, game shows and reality television).

Sbaiti has served as co-editor of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal since 2005, and she helped produce the acclaimed documentary film About Baghdad (2004).

Abdullah Al-Arian is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat's Egypt (Oxford, 2014). During the fall of 2014, when this interview was conducted, he served as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is co-editor of Jadaliyya's Critical Currents in Islam page.

Ziad Abu-Rish is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University. He is co-editor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Older Order? (2012), and author of Protests, Regime Stability, and the History of Authoritarian State Formation in Jordan in the forthcoming edited volume Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (2014).

In addition to his publications, Ziad serves as one of the senior editors of the Arab Studies Journal. Ziad is co-editor of Jadaliyya. His co-authored Jadaliyya articles can be found here.

Twitter: @ziadaburish

Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University where she teaches in the legal studies, international studies, and human rights/social justice studies concentrations. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. 

Upon completing law school, Noura received a New Voices Fellowship to develop a litigation unit aimed at redressing Palestinian human rights claims under the ATS in US federal courts. She went on to serve as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. In Spring 2010, Noura worked with a Lebanese human rights attorney to file habeus corpus petitions on behalf of Iraqi refugees detained by Lebanese authorities.Upon leaving Lebanon, she became the Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights where she represented their claims before the Human Rights Council, human rights treaty bodies, among the UN diplomatic missions as well as among the US Administration and Congress. 

Her scholarly publications include: "U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction" in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review, and "Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement," forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law . Noura’s media appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. She has published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the co-editor with Mouin Rabbani of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. Twitter: @4noura