“Our inheritance was left to us by no testament” – René Char
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
It was an honour to launch the book event ‘Brigitte Schiffer: Letters from Cairo, 1935–1963,’ authored by Dörte Schmidt and Matthias Pasdzierny. They discussed 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 were played at the event through a string quartet.
Date: 6 pm, 23rd November 2022
Venue: Goethe Cairo
I was delighted to give a lecture and workshop for Turkish students and cultural workers as part of the Summer School at the Swedish Institute Istanbul titled: Remembering and Coexisting in Turkey and the Eastern Meditteranean. We focussed primarily on Istanbul and Alexandria, discussing how the latter has become a bellweather for the erosion of pluralism, and how Istanbul understands this “demise” of Alexandria, and the warning it serves it and other cities.
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
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.
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.”
