The NYUAD Institute is a center of advanced research, scholarly and creative activity, and public workshops. Institute programs facilitate discussion between academics, students, professionals, and leaders from the UAE and from around the world.
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NYUAD Institute


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Privacy in a Globally Interconnected World
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November 8, 2020In 2019 it was estimated that more than 20 billion internet-of-things (IoT) devices were active around the world. This includes all computational devices capable of holding and processing personal data, such as smartphones, fitness trackers, smart bulbs, cleaning robots, etc. The wealth of data collected and processed by IoT devices…
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NYUAD Institute


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Nature's Shapes and Patterns and the Instabilities That Create Them
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November 22, 2020It could be argued that mathematics was born with the purpose of making sense of nature's patterns. The mathematics of simple and regular shapes was developed first, and with great success, so much so that predictable regularity and mathematics have become somewhat synonymous in common speech. But, unbeknownst to most of the genera…
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COVID-19: The Future of Globalization and Development
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November 10, 2020Globalization has been the most progressive force in the history of humanity, bringing more progress, more quickly, to more people than anything preceding it. And yet, globalization appears more unpopular than ever as it leads to more risks. COVID-19 will not kill globalization; on the contrary it will accelerate its growth and tra…
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NYUAD Institute


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The Right to the Ruins: Fictional Media Production and the Syrian Conflict
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November 16, 2020Part of "Art and Power in the Middle East: Past and Present"In Syria media creators have manipulated a limited, ambiguous autonomy to produce a thriving transnational television drama industry—one that has survived by responding to, and often challenging, the very conditions that have generated and sustained it. This talk explores …
November 18, 2020Monuments commemorate moments or figures of public victory or sorrow. Some protect significant lands or mark noteworthy geographic features. Most have historically tended to foreground the human species and to avoid sticky subjects and non-dominant histories, including the histories of other species.This panel explores multispecies…
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NYUAD Institute


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Conceptions of Justice in the 1001 Nights
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December 7, 2020In this talk, Enass Khansa examines both the meaning and application of justice in The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah). She shows that the opening story, or frame tale, as well as the two immediately following stories, "The Merchant and the Genie" and "The Fisherman and the ‘Ifrīt," engage in a cohesive debate about t…
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NYUAD Institute


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The Worlds Freshwater Resources Challenges And Opportunities
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October 6, 2020Freshwater is vital for human and environmental health, industrial activities and food production, the production and use of energy, and much more. As human populations and economies grow, pressure on limited water resources are also growing, leading to a variety of challenging problems, including water scarcity and pollution, water-…
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Plague And Contagion In The Premodern Muslim Mediterranean
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September 22, 2020Muslims have been familiar with infectious disease since the time of the Prophet in the seventh century. This talk reviews the diversity of Muslim views on contagion and plague within the context of Islamic law, Sufism, and medicine. What did Muslim scholars say about how one should respond to the challenge of a pandemic, how did …
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As Far As Isolation Goes A Conversation With Tania El Khoury
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September 29, 2020Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury is known for her genre-bending interactive live artworks performed in unique spaces and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. El Khoury discusses her latest micro-theater work, As Far as Isolation Goes (Online), which explores the mental health of asylum seekers thro…
October 4, 2020Award-winning author and journalist Charles Siebert discusses his many experiences visiting with, and writing about, non-human animals, and what they reveal to us about themselves and us. Through his interludes with everyone from a former cellist in an all-chimpanzee circus orchestra; to an octopus escape artist; to elephant and whal…
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The US Election And The Future Of Global Populism
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October 20, 2020Donald Trump was elected in 2016 riding a wave of global populism. His first term has marked a turn toward isolationism, nationalism, and attacks on domestic and international institutions. How will the COVID-19 epidemic and racial protests in the US affect the outcome of the upcoming US election, and what implications will this hav…
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How And Why Immigrant Muslim Communities Are Losing Women
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September 27, 2020Nearly half of Muslim Americans never attend the mosque and have very few Muslim friends. How and why does “unmosquing” happen and to whom? Eman Abdelhadi traces second-generation immigrants’ engagement with Muslim communities using life history interviews and presents four trajectories that emerge from these data. Abdelhadi finds…
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NYUAD Institute


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Oceans Under Climate Stress- Warming Up, Losing Breath, Turning Sour
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2019.10.30Our oceans are becoming increasingly acidic as a result of rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Simultaneously, more than 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions is absorbed by the world’s oceans. As they warm up, oceans lose oxygen, essential for marine life. Together, these effects amplify one another …
2019.10.22Shadow play, known as khayāl al-ẓill, karagöz, or li‘b, is a performing art with a long and rich history in the Arab world. Like Aladdin’s magic lamp that transforms the real world into a fantasy land, the shadow master’s lantern projects fairytales and spectacles with intricate, cartoonish figures onto a screen for enchanted audiences to…
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Standing For Reason- The University In A Dogmatic Age
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2019.11.03Our national discourse has become increasingly toxic, irrational, self-absorbed; our leaders and our citizens suffer from an allergy to nuance and complexity. In his new book, Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age, John Sexton, NYU president from 2002 to 2015, argues that universities must make the fight against this "secu…
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Building From The Sea The Coral Masonry Of Jezirat Al Hamra, Ras Al Khaimah
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2019.11.11A mysterious cluster of over 500 buildings constructed almost entirely from coral, Jezirat Al Hamra, Ras Al Khaimah is a coastal village that was abandoned over half a century ago. This talk traces the evolution of this community, which represents a unique archaeological and architectural asset for the Emirates, into the future, and exami…
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Innovation After Moore’s Law- The Technology Needed For Your Next Smartphone
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2019.11.17Gordon Moore observed that the number of circuits that can be placed on a computer chip doubles every two years. His observation, dubbed Moore’s Law, has served the electronics industry well. In recent years, however, progress has been curtailed by delays in the release of new technologies, skyrocketing chip development costs, and rapidly…
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Khooni Vaisakhi- A Poem From The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919
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2019.04.18The great Punjabi writer Nanak Singh was present at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 and twenty-two years old at the time. As the British troops opened fire on the unarmed gathering protesting against Rowlatt Act, killing hundreds, Nanak Singh fainted and his unconscious body was piled up among the corpses. After going through the trauma…
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Storytelling For A Jaded World- Conversation With Caroline Brothers
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2019.09.10The story of child refugees alone on the highways of Europe originally appeared as newspaper reportage, was reconceived as the fiction work “Hinterland” by Caroline Brothers, and then adapted by Scottish theater company Vox Motus into “Flight,” a groundbreaking, award-winning theatrical work. In this talk, Brothers shares her experience o…
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The Three Pillars Of Radicalization- Needs, Narratives, And Networks
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2019.09.22What fuels radicalization to violence? Is de-radicalization a possibility? How can societies build sustainable peace and reinforce people’s commitment to coexist in harmony? Based on rare field research with terrorists spanning the ideological spectrum, The Three Pillars of Radicalization explores the drivers of radicalization. Evidence c…
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Our Changing Atmosphere Evidence That Demands A Verdict
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2019.09.17Many of our contemporaries are only aware of climate change through public discourse and social media. Drawing on recent scientific papers, Jeffrey Reimer shows how the atmosphere is changing, that humans are the cause, and that there are consequences. Such consequences may be viewed in the context of Earth's historical carbon cycles, whi…
2019.09.25This presentation reviews five years of research conducted at NYU Abu Dhabi exploring the cross-cultural practices and understanding of musical rhythm. Three previously held workshops bringing together experts from musicology, computational modeling, cognition, and neuroscience informed the formation of a large corpus of music from the re…
2019.09.30It is more than three years since the British people voted to leave the European Union (EU), which it is set to do on October 31. If it does so without a deal then this will have serious economic and political repercussions throughout Europe, but especially in Britain. How did we get here? This talk explores how the separate but interwove…
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A Tale Of Resilience How Music Saved My Life And Transformed A Country
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2019.10.02Born into a family of artists, Arn grew up in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. He spent his youth in a child labor camp, forced to play propaganda music, before being adopted and raised in the US. He returned to Cambodia on a mission: to unearth his family’s legacy and to find his former music teacher and the stars of his childhood…
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Not Without Qualms - Shakespeare, Digitization, And Critical Making
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2019.10.07The digitization of early modern England’s print culture has reignited the quest to locate Shakespeare's missing presence. Scholars once searched out lost manuscripts; now computational analysis promises to identify signature features "encoded in the text," as Peter Kirwan puts it. This talk addresses what happens when we use digital affo…
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People Of Ras Al Khaimah- Migration And Belonging
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2019.10.09Ras Al Khaimah is an emirate of superheroes: captains who survived shipwrecks, shipbuilders who survived lightning strikes, honey collectors who scaled mountains, and entrepreneurs who made a strange land home. This talk shares the stories behind the photo book "People of Ras Al Khaimah," a collection of the personal histories of more tha…
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NYUAD Institute


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From Child Soldier To NY Times Best - Selling Author
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2019.10.23Ishmael Beah was recruited as a child soldier to fight in the Sierra Leone Civil War when he was thirteen years old. This talk explores how he survived the brutality of the war to become the renowned author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and UNICEF’s First Advocate for Children Affected by War in 2007. The Washington Post wr…
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A Career In Public Service From President Carter To President Obama
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11.04.2019A Career In Public Service From President Carter To President ObamaDuring a decade and a half of public service in four U.S. administrations, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat discusses his career in politics and law and his new book "President Carter: The White House Years" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018).SpeakersStuart E. Eizenstat, Former Unit…
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Building Oil Pasts And Futures- The Norwegian Petroleum Museum
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15.04.2019Building Oil Pasts And Futures- The Norwegian Petroleum MuseumNorway struck oil in 1969 with the discovery of the giant Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea, and during the last 50 years Norway has developed an advanced offshore oil and gas industry. The activities and income from the industry have made a big impact on Norwegian society. Si…
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Seeing The World How US Universities Make Knowledge In A Global Era
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01.05.2019Seeing The World How US Universities Make Knowledge In A Global EraU.S. research universities have long endeavored to be cosmopolitan places, yet the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology have remained stubbornly parochial. Despite decades of government and philanthropic investment in international scholarship, the mo…
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Optical Tweezers Shedding Light On Life’s Molecules, One At A Time
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08.04.2019Optical Tweezers Shedding Light On Life’s Molecules, One At A TimeRecent advances have led to the new field of single molecule biophysics. Single-molecule techniques record characteristics that are otherwise obscured by traditional approaches, revealing the behavior of individual biomolecules. Prominent among the new techniques is ‘optica…
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Gender And Globalization In Contemporary Visual Art
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10.04.2019Gender And Globalization In Contemporary Visual ArtThis program features the work of renowned feminist visual artist Shahzia Sikander. As an artist that hails from the Pakistani diaspora, Sikander’s work engages multiple national and transnational frames simultaneously, drawing attention to the imbrication of race, class, gender, and reli…
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NYUAD Institute


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Making Sense Of A Changing World: Poetry And Music In Contexts Of Political Instability
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24.04.2019Making Sense Of A Changing World: Poetry And Music In Contexts Of Political InstabilityProfessor Kelly Askew, a renown anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, explores how music and poetry can offer opportunities for ordinary people to navigate, make sense, and negotiate moments of political transitions. This talk includes video-clips,…
29.04.03Eating AnimalsHow much do people know about the food that's on their plates? Based on the bestselling book by Jonathan Safran Foer and narrated by co-producer Natalie Portman, Eating Animals is an urgent, eye-opening look at the environmental, economic, and public health consequences of factory farming. Tracing the history of food productio…
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Are We The Same Or Different: Ethnicity And Personality In The Human Face
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2019.04.01Are We The Same Or Different: Ethnicity And Personality In The Human Face?As a social species, humans are drawn naturally to differentiate people on many different dimensions, such as identity, sex, age, ethnicity, emotion, and personality. This talk aims to review the science on face processing, and pay attention to two specific issues: …
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NYUAD Institute


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Making & Remaking Our Home(land) - Loss, Resilience, And An Alternative Future For Syria
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2019.03.25Will Syrians ever find home again or are we destined to forever settle in the plight of resettlement? Must we finally let go of home in order to belong once more?For millions of displaced Syrians around the world, home prevails somewhere between fading memories and fragile dreams. In the aftermath of despair, the idea of home stretches be…
March 12, 2019Inspired by the celebrated aphorism, “Know Thyself!”, which was inscribed on the forecourt at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Socrates admonished his followers that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In a similar vein, the Buddha famously urged his disciples to “Be a lamp unto yourself”. What does it mean to take these maxims …
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New Voices From The Street: Historians Of The 18th - Century Levant
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03.04.2019The presentation exposes and explains a literary and social phenomenon when regular people from all walks of life took up the pen and wrote history in a language that mixed in their own colloquial dialects and oral literary forms. The authorship of chronicles had been the exclusive purview of the scholars (the`ulamā') who recorded events …
03.06.2019Who are you?—Even a cursory take on this potent question reveals an important truth: your metaphysical commitments matter. What you take to be real about yourself and the world through which you move has immediate and profound consequences: what is the best life for you to live? What weight do your ethical claims have? This talk explores …
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Ancient Egypt And Social Inclusion - How To Create A Sustainable Cultural Landscape
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2019.02.21The primary duty of a museum is to preserve heritage features of outstanding universal value for future generations. Preserving implies studying, understanding, and implementing conservation, but also communicating and engaging with the public in as many levels as possible. The connections and entangled relations between modern life and a…
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Glorious Failure- How To Bring A New Drug To The Market
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2019.02.24Drugs that address an unmet medical need have an enormous positive impact on society: introducing antibiotics and vaccines to common use in the middle 20th century shifted the life expectancy in the United States from 47 to 78 years and removed infectious disease as the major cause of death. Despite this enormous benefit, bringing new dru…
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Who Are we? What Can Genetics Tell Us About Identity?
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2019.02.19What can the mapping of the human genome tell us about who we are? The twentieth century ended with the consensus in the social sciences and humanities that our group identities are constructed through social interaction rather than biologically determined. Does the mapping of the human genome in the twenty-first century challenge that co…
The Taming Of The Plants2019.02.04Domestication is a co-evolutionary process that occurs when wild plants are brought into cultivation by humans starting about 12,000 years ago, leading to the origin of new species that we depend on for our food and clothing. How did humans accomplish this? How do crop plants evolve to adapt to humans and new envir…
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Feeling Smart - Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think
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Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think2019.02.06 Feeling Smart (Perseus Books Group, 2015) deals with the relationship between our emotional being and our rational one, and the implications of this relationship to areas such as economics, business, romance and the social interactions. This talk addresses the following questions: Are emoti…
Abu Dhabi And The City Of The Future 2019.02.11Photographer Andrew Moore presents his images of Abu Dhabi in the context of other cities around the world that he has shot and done projects on. In particular, Moore's talk focuses on how the principles of intelligent urban design apply to these different cities and the lessons learned from both good …
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Islands Of Heritage Conservation And Transformation In Soqotra
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Islands Of Heritage Conservation And Transformation In Soqotra 2019.02.13Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural hi…
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SocioEconomic Challenges Public Policy In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence
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SocioEconomic Challenges Public Policy In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence2019.02.17The artificial intelligence/data revolution will affect our lives in ways unrivaled by previous revolutions. While it will substantially raise our standards of living and improve our health, almost every labor market will be disrupted, leading to widespread concer…
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Quantum Mechanics And The Nature Of Spacetime
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2019.01.30The understanding of the universe has taken great leaps in the early 20th century due to the discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics changing our conception of the very nature of matter, space, and time. Much research has centered on the interesting interplay between the surprising and counter-intuitive features of quantum m…
2019.01.29The seabed around the world has proven to be an archaeological treasure trove, consistently yielding items that are rewriting history books and filling museums. The Arabian Gulf has one of the longest and richest seafaring traditions anywhere in the world. Prior to 8,000 years ago sea levels were considerably lower and the land to the nor…