Event
Digital Forays and Global Uprising: Archiving a Revolution: Smartphones, Social Media & Protest
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.
November 5, 2020
12:30pm - 2:00pm
Online event
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 (LSE) and Jasmina Metwaly (Artist/Filmmaker), Isra Ali (NYU Steinhardt) and discussant Marie Grace Brown (University of Kansas) on 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 here or copy and paste the link to your browser: http://bit.ly/
– Omar Al-Ghazzi, Extreme Speech | An Archetypal Digital Witness: The Child Figure and the Media Conflict Over Syria
– Mark R. Westmoreland, Street Scenes: The Politics of Revolutionary Video in Egypt
– Middle East Eye, Internet, interrupted: How network cuts are used to quell dissent in the Middle East
Omar Al-Ghazzi is an 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 Clinical Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt and 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 in the Department of History at the University of Kansas.
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.
Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on our Youtube page.