Book Talk – The Social History of Amman through Photography

Myriam Ababsa is a social geographer who has worked for over 20 years as an urban specialist for the United Nations on housing, informal settlement upgrading, local governance, compact growth and land value capture instruments in the MENA region. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure (FSC 1993), she holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Tours (2004). She is an associate researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO), at CAREP Paris, and works for Lugarit. Her first book, Amman de pierre et de paix (Autrement, 2007), portrayed 27 figures from the worlds of art, architecture, and literature. Since then, she has edited Raqqa, territoires et pratiques sociales d’une ville syrienne (IFPO, 2009), Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East (AUC, 2012), the Atlas of Jordan (IFPO, 2013), and, most recently, Syrian Society in War and Revolution (IFPO, 2025), co-edited with V. Napolitano. She has received a Special Mention for Best Doctoral Dissertation from the Syrian Studies Association in 2006, and the World Bank VPU Team Award for Innovation in 2019 and 2023.

Falestin Naïli is Assistant Professor in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel. She is a social historian specializing in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Jordan. She has focused much of her recent research on local governance and politics, particularly in Jerusalem and its region.  Through her interest in collective memory and oral history she often reaches present-time issues, including the politics of heritage. She was a core team member of the ERC project “Opening Jerusalem’s Archives” before joining the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) Amman as a researcher and head of office between 2017 and 2020. She is the author of La Palestine entre Patrimoine et Providence (Karthala, 2022). In 2023, Falestin Naïli received a Consolidator Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for her current collective research project "Futures Interrupted: social pluralism and political projects beyond coloniality and the nation-state" (https://fi.hypotheses.org). 

Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) since 2012. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. After teaching at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the Population Council in Cairo. In 1999, she joined the SSRC in New York as director of the Middle East and North Africa program and the Eurasia program. She also developed the InterAsia Partnership program hosted by the SSRC until 2021 and currently hosted by the ACSS.  Her publications include Seeing the World: How US Universities make knowledge in a Global Era (co-authored with M. Stevens and C. Miller-Idriss) Princeton University Press 2018; and “South and North, East and West: Knowledge Circulations and Connections in a Disordered World” In Thinking the Re-Thinking of the World (eds. K. Kresse and A. Sounaye), De Gruyter 2022.

Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz is an architectural and urban historian specializing in the modern Middle East and the Balkans, and the global urban history of the interwar period. His interests include urban planning, architecture, historic preservation, and representations of urban space, broadly defined, in visual and written media. Açıkgöz’s first book explores the urban modernization of Istanbul during the post-Ottoman/early republican period (1923-1949) at the intersection of local, national, and global dynamics. His second book project is a comparative urban history of the postimperial cities in Eurasia during the interwar period, which focuses on infrastructure, urban planning, contestations over the city, and the fictional representations of the urban. Açıkgöz is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, School of Architecture and Design. He received his PhD in Art History from Rice University.