CCMO’s 10th Annual Conference
October 14–15, 2025
Collège de France (site Ulm)
This call for papers invites scholars from various disciplines and countries across the region to take stock of ongoing research, at a time when emotional currents are particularly in- tense. It seeks to explore how emotions unfold, circulate, and are regulated or instrumenta- lized, in an era where their digital expression plays a decisive role in shaping the understanding and representation of contemporary conflicts. The symposium aims to bring together researchers who analyze emotions from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, with particular attention to their relational dimension—taking into account the flows and confrontations between individuals, collectives, and institutions—as well as to their material, temporal, and spatial embeddedness.
Argument
The recent upheavals in the Middle East and the Maghreb have generated a profound emotional intensity, both locally and globally, dramatically conveyed and made visible through social media. These digital platforms have become key channels for sharing, in real time, the raw emotions triggered by the major political and social events that have marked the region in recent years: the horror, fear, and suffering experienced in Gaza in response to images of massacres, serving both as powerful testimony and as an act of resistance against the dehumanizing discourse of the Israeli state; the relief, shock, and disbelief surrounding the opening of prisons in Syria, symbolizing both liberation and trauma; the outrage sparked by the expulsion of migrants by security forces into the desert in Tunisia, sometimes disturbingly met with approval by local populations; the shock provoked by the earthquakes of 2023 in Syria, Turkey, and Morocco; and the sense of stupefaction emanating from Lebanon, where images of material destruction caused by the port explosion and, more recently, by Israeli bombings intertwine with poignant messages from the diaspora expressing existential anxiety.
