Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space, Media, and Participation
Space Working Group
The Space Working Group is coordinated by Professor Paul Amar (University of California, Santa Barbara).
This Working Group researches public spaces and spatializing embodiments that reverse class, sectarian, and gender segregation, foster social equalization, revive previous intersectional public subjectivities, and/or create future utopias. The research explores the context and legacies of the “Arab Spring”-era events, while largely (but not exclusively) focusing on countries identified more with war and counterrevolution rather than with the triumphant social uprisings of 2011. Thus, the research aims to bridge gaps between analyses of spaces of war and armed intervention (in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Bahrain, etc.), and embodiments of future hope, inclusion, and justice across the Arab region.
Very exciting work has been done in the last generation shedding critical light on regimes of power, cultures of fear, and technologies of planning that have transformed public spaces. This work has focused on deconstructing neoliberal policies and discourses, exposing the techniques and economies of war and occupation, and articulating the spatial dimensions of postcolonial moral, ethno-sectarian, and religious regimes. This generation of scholarship has asked: How have social classes have been polarized by new kinds of space and public morality; how have built forms and spatial performances exacerbated sectarian divisions or even “invented” them; how have regimes of public-space regulation instituted regimes of puristic or pietist morality; and how have shifting norms of public-versus-private space restricted gender identities and issues of sexuality to an ever-narrowing private sphere where consumer and patriarchal values dominate. However, this set of research innovations have tended to neglect the kinds of spatial practices, movements, public embodiments, and policy regimes that can reverse or generate spatial alternatives that counter these segregatory dynamics and territorialization practices.
In this light, “Producing the Public: Spaces of Struggle, Embodiments of Futurity” aims to produce a new body of comparative case studies. This Working Group is oriented explicitly toward positive alternatives, even in the most fraught contexts, and will offer new analyses of spatial and historical relations of power, war, control, and subjectivation.
The Space Working Group has five members working on individual projects. Click on the links below to see the bio of each group member.
Paul Amar: Popular Embodiments and Public Morality in Libya and Egypt
Omar Dahi: Civil conflict in Syria: Fragmented Refugee Publics and the Political Economy of Survival
Mona Damluji: Socio-Spatial Networks in Education City: Futurity, Liberalization, and New Urban Publics in Qatar
Adnan Husnein: Poetics of Informality in Laboring New Libya: Spaces of Struggle, Inclusion, and Dialogue
Mohamed El-Shahed: Besieged Publics in the Shadow of a Mega Project: The Manufacture of Urban Uncertainty in Port Said
