World Arabic Language Day, UNESCO HQ (Paris)

It was an honour to present my research findings at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Arabic language preservation initiatives among the diaspora in Germany for World Arabic Language Day on 18 December 2023. Also, my colleagues Abdalhadi Alijla presented on the diaspora in Sweden, and Nada Yafi on the diaspora in France. There will be a publication of our papers in the next two to three months.

Publics Under Threat (Humboldt University, Berlin)


Date: 6pm 23 June 2023
Venue: Humboldt Graduate School
Festsaal (2. OG) Luisenstraße 56 10117 Berlin
Event details

Publics and their boundaries play a central role in discussions surrounding digital communication, freedom of expression, and the future of democracy. In the context of the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, publics have been thrust into the spotlight, particularly as they relate to fake news, filter bubbles, and manipulated flows of information.

However, the tension between the expansion and the fragmentation of publics is seldom explicitly examined from a global perspective, even though the topic of the boundaries and limits of publics is increasingly relevant to power and geopolitics. Furthermore, there are fundamental social questions as to who is and can be part of publics. Who can participate? And who remains an outsider?

The project builds on the research results of the Emmy Noether group Reaching the People: Communication and Global Orders in the Twentieth Century (FU Berlin, 2017–2022) and relates these results to current topics and conflicts.

Despite the expansion of new communication technologies, we have entered a dark age of public debates: AI-generated fake news, filter bubbles, and controlled information endanger democracies and shore up authoritarian governments. Consequently, the ideal of a public sphere where calm, rational arguments are exchanged is more remote than ever. Accessibility and inclusion are still largely out of reach. Instead, we witness increasing fragmentation and polarization. This has so far, however, been mostly explored in isolated national contexts, and not as a truly global phenomenon. On this evening in Berlin, we will transcend boundaries and borders to take a closer look at the Arab Middle East, Iran, and South Asia. Who is and can be part of publics in these regions? Who gets to participate? And which voices are excluded?

Our guests Amro Ali (Sociologist, Casablanca), Shenila Khoja-Moolji (Critical Muslim and Gender Studies, Washington, DC) and Ghazal Abdollahi (Artist and Activist, Berlin) will debate the challenges and threats to publics at our current moment, focusing on public protests and questions of gender. The discussion is hosted by Valeska Huber (Global History, Vienna) and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (Islamic Studies, Freiburg).

The event will build on the research results of the Emmy Noether group Reaching the People: Communication and Global Orders in the Twentieth Century (FU Berlin, 2017–2022) and relate these results to current topics and conflicts.

The discussion will be followed by a reception from around 8:30 pm. The event will be in English.

Standup comedy at the Salon Sophie Charlotte event (Berlin)

So after an 11-year hiatus, I resumed my standup comedy and it felt so cathartic again. Thank you to everyone who came. Who would have thought that Germany would provide you with so much comic material to work with?

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 13 May 2023.

Here is one of several dated videos of my stand-up comedy in Canberra, Australia. Also, here is a very old interview on my stand-up comedy in the Montreal Review.

Book Presentation: ‘Brigitte Schiffer: Letters from Cairo, 1935–1963’

I will be launching the book event ‘Brigitte Schiffer: Letters from Cairo, 1935–1963,’ authored by Dörte Schmidt and Matthias Pasdzierny. They will discuss the fascinating life of Brigitte Schiffer, a Jewish-German woman who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and found refuge in Cairo and, among other achievements, documented the musical traditions of Siwa which will be played through a string quartet.
Date: 6 pm, 23rd November 2022
Venue: Goethe Cairo

Bringing Philosophy and Sociology to the Egyptian Public (public lecture)

This lecture will discuss how sociology and philosophy are conveyed to the public in restrictive contexts in the Arab world. Using Egypt as an example, Dr. Amro Ali will outline the approach taken to teach the social sciences and humanities to public audiences in Cairo and Alexandria. This is premised upon the idea that the public should be recognised, and elevated, as the primary ideal, and the individual’s present difficulties in experiencing or attaining pluralism and civic responsibility are tied to the city’s loss of meaning and the citizen’s alienation from one another. The development of socio-philosophical thinking in local spaces can help address this malaise. The lecture will be presented via Zoom at the Australian National University.

Date: 9 June.

Time: 9.30am (Cairo/Berlin) – 5.30pm (Sydney)

Details: https://cais.cass.anu.edu.au/…/cais-public-lecture…

Background essay on the topic: https://trafo.hypotheses.org/28053

Alexandria: the Far Eastern Capital of the Maghreb

I will be giving a public lecture at Leiden University on 21 January 2022, titled “Alexandria: The far eastern capital of the Maghreb” which is based on the recent essay “Where couscous ends: Maghrebi routes to Alexandria.”

Time: 11am (Alexandria time) / 10am (Amsterdam time)

The zoom link can be accessed here and does not require registration.

The Place of Cultural Pluralism in Alexandria

I will be giving this panel talk, along with Mohamed Gohar and Will Hanley, on cultural pluralism in Alexandria on 21st October 2021. Click here for registration.

“Less than a hundred years ago, most Eastern Mediterranean cities were marked by a high degree of cultural pluralism. Whereas the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern nation-states heralded its end, some cities retained their cosmopolitan nature well until the Second World War. Oral histories and communicative memories of ethnoreligious groups that constituted vital parts of these cities are still living, often wound up with unhealed and suppressed historical. At the same time, simplified and nostalgic visions of a pluralist past are sometimes held up as role models for present-day Eastern Mediterranean societies without questioning, or without regard for the challenges that they entail. Local academics and civil society organizations alike play vital roles in researching, highlighting and supporting pluralism and pluralist heritage, sometimes in defiance of nationalist historiographies and policies.”

Reimagining the Arabs: literature and social contracts

The live event (27 September 2021) at Casa Arabe in Madrid was wonderful and engaging. Along with the institute’s Karim Hauser and Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir, we discussed reimagining futures for the Arab world through literature and social contracts. I discussed the themes in my book chapter “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif.

You can watch the recorded lecture, panel discussion, and Q&A here.
English: https://youtu.be/rdE1cXWBg1c
Spanish: https://youtu.be/xzWBcEqk9Co

Reading Dystopian Impulses in Contemporary Alexandria (public lecture)

The seminar, which is hosted by the EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien, explores how the Egyptian city of Alexandria has long been subjected to utopian and dystopian tensions that permeate the arts, literature, architecture, history, and everyday language. One of the seeds of utopianism could be traced to Naguib Mahfouz’s novella Miramar (1967) that repositioned Alexandria as a welcoming safe haven and a cosmopolitan asylum that can bring back an Egyptian utopia and an alternative vision of the homeland, and made more vivid in films like Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why? (1978) that aligned with the then growing trend that represented Alexandria as a utopian desire. The question of utopianism leaped into the political realm in the 1990s that saw Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the international community take an interest in Alexandria as a lost utopia that must somehow be restored through a Greco-Roman refashioning and an uncritical revival of cosmopolitan discourse. This was a useful guise for neoliberal economics with Alexandria being the laboratory for privatisation – later rejected through the 2011 revolution that led to, albeit temporary, forms of civic utopia emerging. Yet the road from utopia to dystopia was inevitable, and this seminar seeks to understand the growing dystopian impulses of recent years that are shaped by, and in turn shape, the coastal city’s thematic peculiarities: nihilism, mutant capitalism, climate change, nostalgia, among others, in illuminating the tendency towards dystopian motifs.