The Revolutionary Public Sphere

 

Yakein Abdelmagid is a third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University. He received his training in Cultural Anthropology at the American University in Cairo where he worked on the interweavings of neoliberalism, insecurity, masculinity and immaterial labor in the social worlds of Karate players in Egypt during 2009-2010. As part of his doctoral research, his current project investigates independent music production in Egypt in the last ten years, focusing on musicians as workers whose creative labor is situated between entrepreneurial aspirations, desires for alternative lifeworlds, and precarious labor conditions.

 

Omar Al-Ghazzi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. His research interests include global communications, Arab journalism, and the intersections of politics and popular culture. His work has appeared in Popular Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Media, Culture and Society. A former Fulbright fellow, Omar comes from a journalism and media analysis professional background and has previously worked for the BBC and Al-Hayat Arabic daily. His dissertation examines Arab discourses on memory and history and their relation to collective action.

 

Anahi Alviso-Marino is a PhD candidate in political science at the universities Paris 1-Sorbonne and Lausanne. Her recent publications include: “Les transformations de l’art moderne et contemporain au Yémen,” in Bonnefoy L. et al., Yémen: Le tournant révolutionnaire (2012); “Les murs prennent la parole: street art révolutionnaire au Yémen,” in Bonnefoy L. et Catusse M., Jeunesses arabes. Loisirs, cultures et politique (2013); and “Soutenir la mobilisation politique par l’image: photographie contestataire au Yémen” in Participations, N°6, forthcoming. She has also published in Chroniques Yéménites/Arabian Humanities International Journal, Le Monde Diplomatique Arabic editions and Nafas Magazine/Universes-in-universe. Her doctoral work investigates visual arts and politics in Yemen, where she conducted fieldwork from 2008 until 2011.

 

Walter Armbrust is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, and the Albert Hourani Fellow at St. Antony’s College. He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge 1996), editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, and has authored numerous articles and book chapters focusing on mass media and popular culture in Egypt, most recently “The Trickster in the January 25th Revolution” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 4: 834-864). He is currently writing a book on Egypt’s Revolution titled A Symbolic Revolution: Culture and Politics in Post-Mubarak Egypt, under contract with Princeton University Press.

 

Donatella Della Ratta is Post Doctoral Fellow at the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, Center for the study of Race, Politics, and Culture and an Affiliate to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She obtained her PhD on the politics of Syrian TV drama from the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has authored two monographies and curated chapters on Arab TV and new media in several collective books. Donatella has also a background in community management and Internet activism: she managed the Arabic speaking community for international NGO Creative Commons for five years, and is co-founder of the web aggregator Syria Untold.

 

Tarek El-Ariss is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013), and editor of the forthcoming MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: Literature, Culture, Media. He also edits a series on literature in translation for UT Press, Emerging Voices from the Middle East. His new book project examines the way modes of circulation and exhibitionism, and hacking and leaking shape contemporary writing practices, knowledge production, and critiques of power in the Arab world.

 

Nouri Gana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects and of The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013). He has published numerous articles and chapters on the literatures and cultures of the Arab world and its diasporas in such scholarly venues as Comparative Literature Studies, PMLA, Public Culture and Social Text and has contributed op-eds numerous magazines and international newspapers. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of melancholia in the Arab world and another on the history of cultural dissent in colonial and postcolonial Tunisia.

 

Nour Halabi is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a degree in Applied Foreign Languages from Paris (IV) Sorbonne, and a Masters in Comparative Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics. Nour’s research concerns the political economy of media systems in the Middle East, and cultural production in the Arab Spring.

 

Adel Iskandar is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) and also teaches in Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT), Georgetown University. He is the author and coauthor of several works including Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Basic Books, 2003). Iskandar's work deals with the intersections of media (print, electronic, and digital), culture, identity, and politics and has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His recent publications include two coedited volumes entitled Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press, 2010) and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween, 2013). His latest work is the authored anthology Egypt In Flux: Essay on an Unfinished Revolution (OUP/AUC Press, 2013). He is also a co-editor of the online publication Jadaliyya.

 

Marc Owen Jones is a PhD student in the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham in 2011. In 2010, he received an MSc in Arab World Studies from Durham University. He received his BA in Journalism, Film and Broadcasting from Cardiff University in 2006 before spending a year in Sudan teaching English. This interdisciplinary background has formed the basis of his PhD research, which focuses on the history of political repression in Bahrain. Marc keeps a regular blog on Bahrain, and has written extensively on the use of social media as a tool of social control.

 

Amal Khalaf is a researcher and curator and currently Projects Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London working on the Edgware Road Project. With an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, her research addresses themes of urbanism, community, media activism and art through participatory projects, and media initiatives. Previously, she has worked with Al Riwaq Gallery, Bahrain, and participated in setting up an art space in an abandoned railway arch in East London. Her writing appears in journals such as Ibraaz, ArteEast and Middle East Critique and are included in forthcoming publications Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practice in North Africa and the Middle East, London, I.B. Tauris, 2014 and Moving Image and Everyday Life: Cairo, London and Shanghai, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

 

Shayna Silverstein is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Humanities Forum. Her research examines embodiment, sound, personhood, modernity and politics in Syrian popular culture and has received substantial support from Fulbright-IIE, University of Chicago, and US Department of Education. Shayna has published in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Middle East studies, and serves as an editor for Norient Journal. She has taught at Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania. Shayna received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago in 2012. She will join Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the fall of 2014.

 

Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen is a professor at the New Islamic Public Sphere Programme, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. His field of research is modern Islam. His focus is on the establishment of a modern Muslim public sphere, and the role of the Muslim ulama in modern Arab states. His key publications include Defining Islam for the Egyptian State - Muftis and Fatwas of the Dār al-Iftā (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Middle Eastern Cities 1900-1950: Public Spheres and Public Places in Transformation (co-edited with H.C. Nielsen), (AUP, 2001); and Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi. (co-edited with Bettina Gräf), (London, New York: Hurst/Columbia UP, 2009). His current research has primarily focused on Islam’s position in the new pan-Arab television networks, and on renewal of the classical Islamic literary genres, such as the fatwa and the khutba.

 

Leila Tayeb is a doctoral student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, an MA in International Affairs from the New School, and a BA in Politics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her dissertation project centers on affect and political potential in music performances in the 2011 Libyan revolution. Her research interests more broadly include phenomenology, dance studies, feminist and queer theory, diaspora and return.

 

Edward Ziter is Associate Professor of Theatre History and Chair of the Department of Drama at New York University. He is affiliated faculty in the Departments of English and Performance Studies. He is author of The Orient on the Victorian Stage and of the forthcoming Syrian Political Theatre: From the June War to the Arab Spring (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). Recent articles include "The Image of the Martyr in Syrian Performance and Web Activism" TDR (2013) and "Clowns of the Revolution: The Malas Twins and Syrian Oppositional Performance" Theatre Research International (2013).