It was an honour to be invited to speak on a topic close to my heart and sharing the panel with stellar figures as Lebanese author Dima Issa and Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa, and moderated by legal scholar Noha Abouleldahab. It was an enriching discussion with a massive turnout in Doha, and it was refreshing to talk about Gaza without any attempted censorship. Thank you to the Middle East Council for the invitation and organising the “Voices from the Arab Diaspora: Public Intellectuals, Literature, and Exile” event.
It was a great pleasure and honour to give a guest public lecture to the inspiring students at the University of Tunis, and thank you to Prof. Anis Ben Amor for the invitation. The topics touched on Gaza, alienation, and recalibrating the moral compass and preserving the ethical self in the era of genocide normalisation.
The Tunis conference ‘Peace Building and Gender in Transitional Societies’ was a tremendous success, and it was an honour to be the moderator for such a critical topic. The event was hosted by the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb.
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.
Berlin-Cairo Express – Two Cosmopolitan Centres of the Early 20th Century in Exchange – Mittwoch, 29. November 2023, Akademiegebäude am Gendarmenmarkt, Einstein-Saal, Jägerstrasse 22/23, 101117 Berlin
Opening the “Berlin-Cairo Express” event at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences that explored the vibrant musical and intellectual exchanges between the two cities in the early 20th century. Thank you to the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities for the invitation and honour to open and participate in the event.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.”
