Working Groups

This working group uses Arabic not only as a language to be taught but as a site for theorizing embodied, task-driven, and community-situated cultural analysis. By bringing together faculty in education, gender studies, media, and digital humanities, we ask: What happens to “culture” when learners cook from an Arabic recipe, navigate a Cairene market simulation, or co-create a digital story with diaspora speakers? These questions are cultural analytic first, pedagogical second.

This working group unites faculty and graduate students to investigate how experiential and task-based learning with Arabic generates new forms of cultural analysis.
Our guiding question: How do task-based, embodied, and community-engaged encounters with Arabic (as a language, script, sound, and cultural practice) reshape our understanding of cultural analysis – beyond what text-based or proficiency-driven models can offer?

Rather than focusing on literature or classroom pedagogy alone, members will collaboratively design, document, and critique small-scale experiential projects, such as:

• Task-based fieldwork: e.g., conducting an oral history interview with a local Arabic-speaking
  community member, then analyzing stance, code-switching, and narrative structure.
  Embodied learning: calligraphy workshops as entry points into debates about adab, aesthetics,
  and authority.
• Digital-experiential hybrids: using AI translation tools in a simulated transnational media task
  (e.g., dubbing a short film clip), then critically examining how gender, dialect, and power emerge.
• Public-facing cultural tasks: co-organizing a student-led “Arabic Culture Lab” with performance,
  poetry, and food, analyzed as acts of cultural production, not just language practice.

Organizers: