Titled "Life in the Middle East: Social Change and Family Structure," the conference targeted academic talks to demographers, sociologists, historians and other social scientists, as well as other people interested in the region.
Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the conference was co-sponsored by the Carolina Population Center and the University Center for International Studies. The academic talks were held in Carroll Hall, and the cultural event was held Saturday night in Graham Memorial.
Students from Professor Sarah Shields' "Women in the Middle East" class coordinated the event.
Jasmine McGhee, chairwoman of the publicity committee, said working to organize the conference showed her the value of learning about Middle Eastern society. "The objective (of the conference) is enlightenment, especially for people coming from outside of academia," she said.
Shields said one goal was to show attendees that ideologies and values in the Middle East change over time. "We (in the United States) present Middle Eastern women as timeless and unchanging," she said. "My hope was to complicate the picture we have of the Middle Eastern family."
Professors from Lebanon and Turkey, as well as UNC and other American universities, held discussions about marriage, fertility and the roles of women in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey.
While the conference did not explicitly address the current violence in the Middle East, Shields said the escalation in violence between Israeli forces and Palestinians affected the event. She said a professor from a West Bank university had planned to participate in the conference but decided to remain with her family instead.
But McGhee said the ongoing violence is only one component of learning about the Middle East. "Hopefully, people will learn there's more to the Middle East than the war on terrorism, more than the Israel-Palestine conflict," she said.
Freshman Katie Rainwater said she attended the conference to fulfill a requirement for her first-year seminar "Sociology of the Islamic World." Her professor, Charles Kurzman, gave a talk about marriage and fertility choices among educated Middle Eastern women. "It made me think about how women in Iran face the same problems I do as far as marriage and their careers," Rainwater said.
