NPF Cycle 1 Fellows
The New Paradigsm Factory (NPF) Program is a writing fellowship that aims at facilitating and supporting writing and publishing by Arab activists and junior scholars.
In the first cycle of NPF, three mentors worked with 10 promising young scholars engaging with various aspects and conceptions of “sovereignty” applied to different contexts and issues across the Arab region. The papers of the fellows who completed the program are to appear in an upcoming special issue of the Arab Studies Journal (ASJ).
Cycle 1 Mentors
Paul Amar has served from 2011-2013 as lead researcher on the project “Societal Violence and Alternative Security Practices” at Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. In the past, he has served as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Cairo University’s Department of Economics and Political Science, worked with the United Nations on conflict and development issues in the Middle East, cooperated on urbanism and public space research at the CEDEJ in Egypt, and been awarded fellowships for study at the American University in Cairo and the University of Marrakesh, Morocco. In 2003, he co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Federal University Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He currently serves as Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Amar's research, publishing, and teaching focuses on the areas of state institutions, security regimes, social movements, and democratic transitions in the Middle East and Latin America, and traces the origins and intersections of new patterns of police militarization, security governance, humanitarian intervention, and spatial transformation in the megacities of the global south. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Security Archipelago (2013).
Mona Fawaz is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Studies and the Coordinator of the Masters in Urban Design, Planning and Policy programs in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut. She was trained as an architect (BArch, 1995, American University of Beirut) and an urban planner (MCP in 1998, PhD in 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research stems from the imperative of making cities more inclusive, particularly from the perspective of enabling low-income dwellers to take part in their making. She has researched informal settlements, large-scale planning projects, and public regulations of the built environment from the critical perspectives of inclusion and enabling. More recently, she has become interested in property conceptions and property regimes as key determinants of the outcome of planning projects. Her recent publications include: “The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah’s Reconstruction of Haret Hreik as Case Study” in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, manuscript accepted, forthcoming 2013; “Towards the Right to the City in Informal Settlements,” in T. Samara, S. He and G. Chen (ed.), Locating the Right to the City in the Global South, London, Routledge, 2013; “Living Beirut's Security Zones: An Investigation of the Modalities and Practice of Urban Security”, City and Society 24(2): 173–195., 2012 (with Mona Harb and Ahmad Gharbieh), and “Exception as the Rule: High-End Developments in Neoliberal Beirut,” Built Environment 36(2): 245-259, 2010 (with M. Krijnen).
Hesham Sallam is a fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is a doctoral candidate in government at Georgetown University and co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine. He is former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013).
Cycle 1 Fellows
Jamil Mouawad: Arab States in the Shadow of Popular Uprisings