Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space, Media, and Participation
Participation Working Group
The Participation Working Group is coordinated by Professor Sherene Seikaly (University of California, Santa Barbara).
The last two years of political upheaval and resistance in the Arab world have revealed new possibilities for social change. Scholars of the Middle East have grappled for several decades with what seemed to be the death of “formal” or “official” politics in their attempt to explain the seemingly impenetrable force of authoritarianism and the pacification of Arab politics. Some work reified older understandings of the idea of agency and the centrality of state institutions. Others broke new ground on the idea of the individual, critically deconstructing the seemingly self-evident meaning and universal value of “freedom” and “agency.” In some ways, both conventional and cutting edge approaches worked to obscure the possibility of politics that could effectively challenge authoritarian structures. What emerged was a lachrymose epistemology of despair. The Arab uprisings seemed to offer a way out of this thinking. But epistemologies of despair continue to hold ground in many academic approaches, which insist on ringing the death knell of participatory politics. At the same time an epistemology of hope has taken new force. Activists, journalists, practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, techies, and performers have honed strategies and visions for the present and the future, centered on collective action.
The Working Group on “Participation” seeks to bridge the gaps between hope and despair by understanding actors outside academia as social theorists and by placing various kinds of social theorists in conversation. The basis for this conversation will be a focus on the histories, experiences, representations, and potentialities of collective action and their relationship to shaping and experiencing various sorts of publics. Such a focus challenges the confines of “civil society,” and its purported lack in the Arab world, to more rigorously engage how collective action shapes and envisions the public. In critically engaging the very idea of the people, both through and against state power, intellectual hierarchies, and national movements, this Working Group will rethink notions and practices of popular sovereignty.
The Participation Working Group has six members working on individual projects. Click on the links below to see the bio of each group member.
Sherene Seikaly: A Protest of the Poor: On the Political Meaning of the People
Lina Attalah: Online Spaces: Parallel and Intersecting Realities
Ahmad Gharbeia: Digital Empowerment: Mapping for Localities
Pascale Ghazaleh: The Common Weal: Constituting National Resources in 19th Century Egypt
Hoda Elsadda: Neoliberalism in Higher Education in Egypt: Histories, Contestation, and Visions for the Future
Laila Shereen Sakr: An Egyptian Virtual Body Politic
Please find below some of the Participation Working Group outputs:
- Who Are the People? A Conversation on the Assemblages and the Archives of the People by Sherene Seikaly
