The inaugural Critical Amazigh Studies Summer Institute (CASSI) took place at the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) from June 30 to July 11, 2025. Co-organized by Brahim El Guabli of Johns Hopkins, Najib Mokhtari of UIR and Aomar Boum of UCLA, the institute marked an important moment in a renewed endeavor to create a rigorous and collaborative venue for Anglophone scholars to reflect together on Amazigh language, culture, history, and anthropology. Selected from a pool of over seventy applicants, the twenty-three attendees had a unique opportunity to build community around critical discussions centered on Amazigh studies. The members of this first cohort hail from Morocco, Spain, Algeria, Germany, France, Egypt, and the United States. Primarily composed of a core group of interdisciplinary PhD students, the cohort also counted one undergraduate student and a professor.
The two-week program was an exceptional moment in the recent history of the field of Amazigh studies. Although this discipline has gained momentum in the last two decades, accessible training pipelines and cross-campus collaboration in Anglophone academia remain scarce and extremely limited. A reality that has put this rich field outside the scope of students’ academic training. It is precisely in order to remedy this situation and fill in the gap in students’ learning about North Africa/Tamazgha that the CASSI has been established. The CASSI introduced the twenty-three participants to key debates and methods in Amazigh studies while also building and offering them a space to build community beyond the limited period they were together in Rabat.
Participants of the inaugural CASSI upon the completion of the program. Photo courtesy of Aomar Boum.
Conceived as a key component of the Amazigh Studies Initiative (AMASI), which has a main objective of increasing engagement with this field among Anglophone academic, the CASSI joins the already ongoing effort to enhance translation and publication from and about Tamazight. The AMASI has spurred several translations of both critical and literary works into English within the Amazigh Studies series at Georgetown University Press. Brahim Akhiate’s memoir The Amazigh Revival will be released in December 2025, and Azergui’s novella The Raven’s Bread is scheduled to be published in early 2026. Tamazgha Studies Journal, which is also part of the AMASI, is about to publish its fourth issue. UCLA was the last American university to have an Amazigh studies department, established thanks to the vision of Gustave E. von Grunebaum, the founding director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and it is befitting that the university is a partner in the AMASI and its initiatives. There is no better way to honor the five-decade legacy of Amazigh studies at UCLA than reconnecting and reactivating this history to maximize students’ training in this increasingly important discipline. In 2023, a gift from the Robert Lemelson Foundation established the Amazigh Studies Program Fund at the UCLA Department for Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. The program is run by Aomar Boum and Brahim El Guabli, in partnership with the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
The CASSI combined language learning with seminars and lectures to optimize the participants' benefits from this opportunity. Each day, for five days, participants learned Tamazight for two and a half hours. The teachers were local, and their immersion methodology sought to train the learners to acquire the language in action. A daily morning seminar was usually dedicated to pressing methodological questions in Amazigh studies, such as defining categories, rethinking geography and space, and questioning nomenclatures. Finally, afternoon lectures were led by leading figures in this field who presented their work on Amazigh history, environmentalism, literature, anthropology, linguistics, film, and media. The program favored direct encounters with institutions and materials. Participants visited the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and concluded with group presentations that connected institute content to their ongoing research and teaching. This distribution of the day encouraged participants to move from linguistic practice to critical discussions to engagement with stakeholders in this field.
The first CASSI has been a tremendous success that has inspired the conveners’ many ideas for the years ahead. Building on this momentum, the organizers will strengthen the next iteration and invest in broadening participation to reach sections of interested parties that were not reached in the inaugural institute.