Karen Culcasi

My book, Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, was awarded the 2023 Meridian Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the American Association of Geographers. https://www.aag.org/award-grant/meridian_book/

Recent publications:

• My first article from my research on anti-Muslim discrimination is (finally) out in the Journal of Rural, "'It's Not So Bad'," Muslims' Experiences and Senses of Belonging in Rural, southern WV". 
• See my co-authored article with Davide Zoppolato "Social Media Geopolitics" The Unofficial Geopolitics of Chinese Vloggers in Pakistan." 
• I am happy to share my article "The challenges and potentials of critical Muslim geographies," which is a commentary on James Sidaway's "Beyond the decolonial: Critical Muslim geographies."
• Please see my article "Gendered Orientalism and the Agency of Syrian women refugees" in Fennia.
  

• As part of the celebration of the 100th edition of the Arab World Geographer, I  published a paper titled "Decolonizing the 'Middle East'."

• Funded through WVU's Humanities Center, I am pleased to post a set of "fact sheets" on Refugees and US Refugee Laws.
  

• Please see my review of Jillian Schwedler's fantastic book, Protesting Jordan.

RESEARCH FOCUS

My research uses critical and feminist geopolitical frames to examine contested places and   identities. My work focuses on  Southwest Asia and North Africa (which is often referred to with the problematic term "Middle East"), the Arab world, and rural West Virginia.

I am currently working on:

• A West Virginia Humanities funded project on Islamophobia and Muslim's daily lives in West Virginia.
• A Franklin Philosophical Society Grant for archival research on maps of the so-called "Middle East," which have been published in textbooks from across many Arab-majority states since the early 20th century.