Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space, Media, and Participation
Media Working Group
This Working Group brings together Arab scholars specializing in anthropology, art criticism, geography, media and cultural studies and philosophy to think through and produce critical, innovative and publicly engaging research examining the connections between media, time and publicness in both urban and rural settings in different parts of the Arab world, including: Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A key focus of this group program is to examine manifestations, meanings and transformations in mediations of ‘public-ness’ and how these can be products of not only locally produced ‘time structures’ but also the result of intersections between ‘local time’, ‘national time’ and ‘world time’. By ‘public-ness’, we mean the discursive/performative and intentional techniques that are used by the media and other forms of artistic/symbolic expression to generate a sense of belonging to a common culture/public and a common time.
The interdisciplinary approach of the program provides space for Arab researchers from different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences to engage dialogically and critically with the question of public-ness and time within wider debates on art, media, philosophy, globalization, modernity and post-modernity. The Working Group will take special interest in examining how different localized and globalized forms of ‘public-ness’, mediated through technologies of seeing, also brings with them different structures and predispositions of time. The research output will consist of ethnographic diaries emerging from fieldwork conducted in rural and urban parts of the Arab world; philosophical writings tracing transformations in the relationship between the Arab Intelligentsia and the masses, as well as visual material including two documentaries and a photographic exhibit (both accompanied by written text/commentary).
The Media Working Group has seven members working on individual projects. Click on the links below to see the bio of each group member.
Tarik Sabry: Media, Time, and Publicness in a Moroccan Amazigh Village
Ramy Aly: Visibility and Publicness: Publics, Counter-Publics, and Neo-Nasserism
Abdulaziz Boumeshouli: Philosophy and the Arab Mobilizations: "New Philosophical Experiments in the Arab World"
Layal Ftouni: Intersections in Time and Space: Arab Art between the Modern and the Contemporary
Joe Khalil: Developing Media in Times of Uprisings: Tempos of Cultural Politics
Amina El-Mekaoui: The Production of Public Discourse about the Moroccan Community in Transnational Space: The Immigrant in Local Media and Public Spheres in Spain
Helga Tawil-Souri: Dis/Formations of Palestine
