Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Media Working Group

Ramy M. K. Aly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Prior to joining AUC, Ramy was Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, where he completed his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2011. His first monograph ‘Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity’ was published by Pluto Press in the summer of 2014. Ramy has taken part in a number of media projects; in 2011 he co-founded the Public Service Broadcasting Initiative in Egypt (e3lamak.tv) which produced political party broadcasts in the run-up to the 2012 parliamentary elections as well as animated public information adverts on human development and poverty indicators across Egypt. In 2012, the project produced Egypt’s first long-form documentary series ‘Awel El-Khayt’ which began its second season in spring 2014. He has also contributed to research on Transnational Television Cultures and Arab Audiences in Europe at the London School of Economics, as well as research on The BBC World Service and BBC Arabic at the Open University and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. Ramy’s main research interests are material and visual cultures, performative gender and sexuality, critical cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis and media anthropology.