We are organizing a panel for the 2005 annual Middle Eastern Studies Association conference, to be held in November 19-22, 2005 in Washington, D.C., and are soliciting abstracts dealing with refugees in the Middle East for participation in this panel.

As a follow up to two MESA panels we organized last year on refugees, we would again like to issue a Call For Papers for the MESA 2005 conference on the subject of refugees. There are no limitations on the topics that participants might cover, but the topics should focus on refugees whose point of origin is from among the geographical areas that MESA papers generally address. We have decided to pursue editing a volume on Middle Eastern refugees and hope that panelists would be eventually prepared to submit their papers for publication.

Panelists may focus on the many ways in which refugees are represented-politically, socially, culturally, nationally-as well address the issue of refugees in international relations, conflict resolution, local economies/global economy, or in other political processes.

Please send a short abstract describing the topic to both Rochelle Davis at radavis@stanford.edu and Kimberly Katz at kkatz@towson.edu by Wednesday, February 9, 2005. We will respond to you by Friday, February 11, 2005. That will give you the weekend to finish up your abstract and complete the on-line submission (yes, MESA now has on-line abstract submission!). However, we need to have everything in by February 14, as the Secretariat insists on a verifying process for electronic submissions.