Research at the Institute
Through Taghyeer, a non-profit organization based in Jordan, the Institute conducts collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences. Projects range from education and curriculum reform to intellectual history and social theory. In what follows, you may learn more about our ongoing research; for an account of previous projects, please contact us at info@ictamman.org.
2026 - Present
As AI systems become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in everyday life, a set of profound questions has moved from the margins of philosophy to the centre of public debate: Can artificial systems be conscious? Can they suffer or flourish? Do they warrant moral consideration? And how will societies in the Global South, especially those with different intellectual traditions, belief systems, and conceptions of the self, respond to the possibility that they might?
These questions are currently being addressed almost entirely within frameworks developed in Western philosophy and cognitive science. The dominant approaches — functionalist theories of mind, global workspace theory, higher-order theories of consciousness, integrated information theory — share a common genealogy rooted in analytic philosophy of mind and Anglo-American cognitive science. These frameworks have generated important and rigorous work, but they are not adequate on their own. Questions about consciousness, inner life, and moral status are among the oldest and most sustained in the history of human thought, and that history extends far beyond the traditions currently shaping the field.
Digital Nafs takes this limitation seriously. Its central proposition is that the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition, one of the most sophisticated and sustained traditions of inquiry into the nature of mind, soul, and moral agency, has genuine contributions to make to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and digital minds. It pursues this proposition along two tracks: a philosophical track that re-reads classical and modern Arab-Islamic thought in light of contemporary questions about AI consciousness, and a sociological track that asks how these traditions shape how people in Arab and Muslim-majority societies actually perceive, engage with, and make moral judgments about AI systems.
The program is animated by a conviction that these two tracks cannot be separated. How people understand AI is shaped by the conceptual resources available to them, by their inherited vocabulary for thinking about souls, intentions, inner states, and moral standing. And conversely, understanding how people actually perceive AI in different cultural contexts is essential for developing philosophical frameworks that are robust and genuinely universal rather than parochially Western. Philosophy and social science, in this program, are not parallel tracks but a single inquiry conducted from two directions.
Outputs
The Digital Nafs program will produce work across three areas:
Philosophically, it will generate research and working papers examining how classical Arab-Islamic accounts of mind, soul, and moral agency, particularly the traditions associated with Ibn Sīnā and al-Ghazālī, bear on contemporary debates about AI consciousness, the inference problem, and moral patiency.
Empirically, it will produce original survey and qualitative research on how people in Jordan and the broader Arab world perceive and make moral judgments about AI systems, contributing cross-cultural data to an international field that has so far drawn almost entirely on Western populations.
Pedagogically, it will develop and publish curriculum materials on AI, ethics, and digital minds for Jordanian public schools, building on ICT's existing Istijarah program. Across all three areas, the program aims to foster ongoing dialogue with international researchers working on digital minds and the social science of AI consciousness, with the aim of making the global conversation on these questions more inclusive and robust.
Classifying Otherwise: On Bilingual Libraries and the Epistemology of the Catalog
The Institute for Critical Thought is building a bilingual Arabic-English research library to serve as a resource for critical thought in the humanities and social sciences. The library is designed around a central conviction: that how knowledge is organised is itself an intellectual and political act. Every decision about how to catalog an Arabic philosophical text alongside a work of contemporary critical theory, how to represent a tradition of commentary that distinguishes between levels of engagement with a source, or how to make a multilingual manuscript available to readers who navigate it from different linguistic and intellectual starting points, is a decision about which epistemology will govern how readers encounter knowledge.
Building the library has meant confronting, as a live institutional problem, questions that are typically treated as theoretical: what does it mean to classify knowledge across traditions that do not share organisational logics? How do you design a collection, both physically and digitally, that honors the self-understanding of its materials rather than imposing an external taxonomy? And how do you build a space that invites in readers who would not normally think of themselves as library users?
These questions inform both the design of the library and a broader research program at ICT on metadata, epistemology, and the function of knowledge institutions. The program asks how libraries and archives can develop descriptive practices that preserve not only what objects are about, but what kind of objects they understood themselves to be within the traditions that produced them, and what follows when they do not.
Outputs
We are developing the ICT library collection and digital archive, producing original research on epistemologically precise metadata and its implications for public knowledge institutions, and building comparative partnerships with national libraries and research institutes engaging the same questions from different institutional positions.
Istijarah: Islam, Virtue Ethics, and Secondary Education
Frameworks for fostering character virtue development have recently turned to indigenous methods and discourses, highlighting resources from a variety of rich traditions in the Global South. As a result, a more locally sensitive and effective set of programs have emerged, which depend on the organic and inherited means of coping with crisis rather than on copying distant and particular Western frameworks. Advancing indigenous frameworks, moreover, has allowed emergent programs to offer their methods and discourses, their deeply humane and community-centered approaches, as active resources for the rest of the world.
In light of migration challenges affecting students in the Arab world, Istijarah has developed a curriculum and pedagogy for public schools in Jordan based on Islamic virtue ethics, focusing on the civic duty textbook for ninth-grade students. Istijarah offers the language and practice needed to inwardly cultivate virtues while outwardly building community. The program has convened stakeholders in academia, government, and the NGO sector to shift the perspective on the Islamic resources for educational reform and character development.
Outputs
We are writing the first of two academic papers for a special issue of the Journal of Moral Education, under the title "Istijarah: On Islamic virtue ethics in public school education," having produced a policy report and a comprehensive curricular addendum for the public school textbook on civic duty.
Rights for Time: Rethinking the temporal dimensions of humanitarian protection
2020 - 2024
Partners with the University of Birmingham and the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Funding Program
Social scientific research geared toward humanitarian protection often engages with the direct and visibly urgent effects of crises. While invaluable in its own right, this type of engagement can undermine the importance of comprehending the ways in which protracted crises may have significant indirect and invisible effects over time. Indeed, such crises produce social and political conflicts, as well as obstacles to lasting peace, which go unnoticed if the short-term tools of policy are the primary lens through which research is conducted.
Rights for Time works on case studies from around the world which offer alternatives to dominant conceptions of time in humanitarian protection. The studies range in methodology and geographic context, from innovative psychological accounts of time and trauma in the work of the Palestine Trauma Center to empirical research into the time of waiting for sexual assault victims in Kenya. Other studies pose historical and literary inquiries into how indigenous concepts and practices, which emerged organically over time, may replace the dominant lexicons of humanitarian organisations.
What unites the studies is an urgent sense that foregrounding the temporal dimensions of humanitarian protection allows us to more carefully examine, challenge, and offer alternatives to the default understanding of time in social science and public policy. This may result in the development of synergies across geographic contexts, innovations in methodology, and thinking about compound harm - from colonial remnants and nationalism to environmental catastrophe - from a more expansive temporal vantage.
Outputs
We are producing a bilingual book about dominant and alternative conceptions of the term 'refugee' in Arab-Islamic history, hosting conferences and seminars, showcasing findings in an art exhibition, and mentoring case studies around the world as part of the Rights For Time network.
Education, Justice, and Memory: On the History and Practice of Teaching Identity in Jordan
2022 - 2024
Partners with the University of Bristol and the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Funding Program
The Jordanian educational sector, and particularly public school curricula and teacher training programs, are in an especially dire state. The sector focuses almost exclusively on STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. This is compounded, even in STEM subjects, by a school and university culture which awards rote memorization and the application of imported methodologies instead of creative, critical, and reflective engagement with personal and national identity. As a result, Jordan has a surplus of educated professionals, while it imports foreign social scientists and humanitarians to work on social programming.
This project intervenes by building a program for training public school teachers about how minority identities may be taught through indigenous history, literature, and language; implementing the program over two seminars in Arabic, based on the project’s curriculum and pedagogy; hosting a conference in Amman about how teaching about the violent past may be incorporated into schools and other institutions of education, including universities, institutes, and language centers; and sharing the experience by publishing the teacher training manual itself, an academic paper, and a policy report.
Outputs
We are preparing a book chapter, titled "Teaching the Humanities as a Mode of Reckoning with the Violent Past: A case from Jordan" for an edited volume to be published by Bristol University Press, having produced a policy report, arts exhibition, and a manual for teachers.