Tadween Publishing Is Launching!

We are hereby launching Tadween Publishing, a new kind of publishing house that seeks to institutionalize a new a new form of knowledge production. A subsidiary of the Arab Studies Institute, Tadween aims both to publish critical texts and to interrogate existing processes and frameworks through which knowledge is produced. Specifically, Tadween is dedicated to four fundamental goals:

• To join the current that challenges the monopoly of the mainstream publishing world by expanding and deepening the notion of what is publication-worthy; 
• To offer readers thoroughly interactive products that bring the benefits of technology to refined scholarship and other significant texts;
• To focus on pedagogy by attending to the way texts and other forms of produced knowledge best make their way into a classroom; and
• To contribute to a new kind of process, and content, of knowledge production on the Middle East and beyond.

We will publish in Arabic, English, and French, and there will be no restrictions on region or topic.

New Forms of Publishable Knowledge

Tadween aims to challenge the barriers, boundaries, and preconceived notions of the mainstream publishing world. At the same time, it aims to elevate the standards of nontraditional media publishing by upholding the peer-review standards applied to traditional scholarship. Each submission, irrespective of its nature and form, will undergo thorough internal vetting before it is submitted to a rigorous peer-review process that involves at least two external reviewers. As a new kind of publishing house that incorporates new forms of media and knowledge-production mechanisms as they evolve, Tadween aspires to help influence the publishing world.

Interactivity with Purpose

Increasingly, knowledge consumers, particularly the new generations, access and process knowledge differently, and are stimulated by a variety of media that did not exist until recently. Tadween seeks not only to join the world of interactive knowledge production, but to do so in an intellectually responsible manner. We recognize that the mechanisms and mediums through which knowledge is accessed, processed, disseminated, and appropriated are not neutral: they impinge on content and message. Tadween’s print publications will thus serve as a gateway into further multifaceted research, bringing together a variety of media forms in a way that facilitates engagement with a subject in all its complexity and depth.

Pedagogy and the Classroom

In expanding the realm of publishable knowledge, Tadween emphasizes its products' pedagogical dimension. Not all publications are equally amenable to a classroom, but most Tadween texts will have teachable and research aspects that will be deliberated in the production process. Tadween's aim to combine the best of scholarship, technology, and creative output is geared toward the purpose of producing more engaging texts, both for students and researchers/educators.

Knowledge Production Project

Finally, Tadween will be the primary vehicle for the dissemination of the fruits of the Arab Studies Institute’s Knowledge Production Project (KPP). This eight-year project aims at gathering/mining, organizing, and analyzing knowledge produced on the Middle East, primarily in the English-speaking world, since 1979. The KPP will create six databases that catalog all peer-reviewed articles on the region, all books, and a variety of other print, visual, and online sources of knowledge, including think-tank policy papers, films, and websites. Tadween will publish the statistical and analytical products associated with this project.

The KPP was born from the understanding that the knowledge on the Middle East that exists in the public realm, particularly in the United States, does not reflect a natural distribution of what needs to be known and that knowledge production is a thoroughly nonneutral and politicized process in which power relations, paradigm bias, and funding play a dramatically disproportionate part. While this insight is not new, it will be newly supported by the KPP's near-comprehensive and meticulous evidentiary base, whose uses cannot all be determined in advance—but we do anticipate that most such uses will contribute to a less problematic knowledge production process in the future.

Tadween (تدوين) means “to document” in Arabic.

Visit our Arabic section here.