Webinar
Digital Forays and Global Uprising: Archiving a Revolution: Smartphones, Social Media, & Protest
This event is a meeting point between both series below.
Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies // A year-long series 2020–2021:
This year-long series starts from a simple premise: What does it look like to think, engage, and do research in this digital age? This is not a call for researchers to simply produce digital outputs—but we live in an ever-increasingly digital world. In order to better activate our scholarship, and to grasp the terrain in which our research questions unfold, we must reimagine our methods, modes of collaboration, and how to participate in a quickly changing digital landscape. See full series overview.
Global Uprising // A year-long series 2020–2021:
Global Uprising is a year-long series that revolves around one question: how do we rethink collective action from our present? Taking the current anti-racist uprising in America and the tenth anniversary of the Arab revolts as launching points for a set of workshops this series delves into the global coordinates of uprising today. Read more about the series here.
If social media was hailed as crucial to the start of the Arab Spring, what has the last 10 years brought in terms of increasing cellphone connectivity, usage, and entwinement in our lives? A flood of research pinpointed changing digital access/practices as linchpins of the Arab Spring (perhaps overly simplistically, or correct)—but what is our perspective looking back over the last 10 years? How do/did we archive the “Arab Spring” and the other swells of protest and dissent across the region? Looking back on what/how we “save,” what do we learn about documentation, memory, and access? The speed, scope, and prevalence of various technologies has expanded exponentially, yet how are we activating/archiving current protests as they now occur?
This panel looks back on many connected waves of protest, but also zooms out to our global present to explore dissent, smartphones, and the digital ephemera that overflow from an ongoing Global Uprising. What does this tell us about the current moment, but some future direction of digital visuality and digital dissent?
Join the Kevorkian Center with Omar Al-Ghazzi, Jasmina Metwaly, Isra Ali, and discussant Marie Grace Brown on Thursday, November 5, 2020, at 12:30 pm (EST) to think through these questions and discuss issues of technology & protest.
To register please follow the link: http://bit.ly/NYUKevo1105
**Event is free, but registration is required**
Omar Al-Ghazzi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Jasmina Metwaly is an artist and filmmaker based in Cairo and Berlin, and a member of the Mosireen video collective.
Isra Ali is a feminist scholar who writes about militarism, citizenship, Islam, and culture. Her current project looks at how Muslims engage the question of citizenship online, in the era of War on Terror militarism.
Discussant: Marie Grace Brown (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East, who specializes in questions of gender and alternative historical texts. Her award-winning first book, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017), argues that Sudanese women used fashion and their bodies to mark and make meaning of the shifting sociopolitical systems of imperial rule. Continuing her interest in sensory experience, Brown’s current project, Sex on the Edge: Adventures in Romance in Imperial Sudan, claims that romance and play were dynamic means through which individuals understood and moved across the British Empire. Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Brown is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas.
Co-sponsored by NYU Grey Art Gallery, and Global and Joint Program Studies, and DUKE-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by October 29, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available within a month to our Youtube page.