The New Paradigms Factory Program (NPF) is a writing fellowship that was launched in 2012. It aims to facilitate research and publishing by innovative, critical-thinking, and engaged junior Arab scholars and activists, particularly those facing limited access to mentoring and/or publishing venues. NPF targets scholars and activists who completed their M.A. in the humanities and the social sciences, providing a nine-month mentorship at the end of which a publication including essays based on fellows’ fieldwork is published. NPF is a thematic program; themes change every three cycles.
The overarching goal of NPF is to help fellows generate novel paradigms and new frames for analyzing the key problems of the day, particularly those linked to the dynamics associated with the recent Arab uprisings and transformations. A “paradigm,” for the purposes of this program, signifies any mainstream pattern of thinking or a predominant model for analyzing a set of social problems, cultural norms, or political situations. A paradigm structures which phenomena should be observed and scrutinized, which questions should be asked, and how realities, data, and findings should be interpreted. A paradigm can also signify a well-established habit of linking cause and effect. A paradigm is both a mode of analysis predominant in the social sciences and also a worldview that underlies how the news media, public spheres, and the state perceive social, political, economic, and/or cultural problems.
Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, activist for women’s rights and founding member of the Woman and Memory Forum (www.wmf.org.eg). She previously held the position of Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. She was Carnegie Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University in 2014-2015. Her research interests are in the areas of gender studies, comparative literature and oral history. She is author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (Edinburgh UP and Syracuse UP, 2012); and co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers, 35:1, 2018).
Muzna Al-Masri is an anthropologist, researcher and consultant who has worked with and consulted several local, international and UN agencies. Her research interests include everyday political practice and clientelism, and the intersection of conflict and politics with humanitarian aid and energy. She holds am MA in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the Eastern Mennonite University and a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (2016-2017) and the Orient-Institute in Beirut (2018) and is currently a Ford Foundation Global Fellow (2020-2021). She is also co-founding member of the Ethnography as knowledge in the Arab World Working Group.
Elham Manea is a Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Zurich. She is the Vice President of the Swiss Federal Commission for Migration. Her academic studies focus on regional relations in the Arabian Peninsula, political Islam, the Arab state and gender politics, and women under Islamic laws. Manea is a writer and human rights advocate. She is a member of the Islamic feminist movement, and has published two books on Shari’a and women, the Arab state and its gender politics. She also led many mixed prayers in several countries inside and outside Europe. Professor Elham Manea has dual citizenship, Yemeni and Swiss. She has published research and advocacy works in Arabic, English and German, in addition to two novels published by Saqi Books in Beirut. Her latest research project addresses the outcomes of the Arab uprisings/revolutions.
Latifa Al Bouhsini is a Professor of Higher Education at Mohammed V University, Rabat. She specializes in Women’s History. She has supervised masters and doctoral students on the subjects of gender and the family as well as “The History of the Moroccan Women’s Movement”. She coordinated a national project on the women’s rights movement in Morocco (2014). She published many articles in scientific journals on women in the medieval era in the Islamic West. She served as member of readers and jurors’ committees for a number of Moroccan and Arab magazines. She also facilitated a large number of seminars, lectures and training workshops on gender issues, and the practices of Morocco on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (2000-2020). She was previously member of the National Coordination Council for the Reform of the Personal Status Code, and a founding member of the Union of Feminist Action.
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Journalism as Gendered Resistance: The Ethics of Journalistic Coverage of Sexual Violence Issues in Egypt
Nationality: Palestinian
Project Title: Women and the Palestinian National Narrative: Women with a Homeland in Mind
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Everyday Life as a Site of Gendered Eesistance in Garden City: Revisiting ethics and Methods in a Chaotic Field
Nationality: Tunisian
Project Title: Community Care as Gendered Resistance: Sub-Saharan African Female Migrants in Tunisia.
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Entry Points to the Lives of Working Women in Popular Markets of Alexandria
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Transport Maneuver: How Women Access Greater Cairo Region – Less Harms and More Territorial Gains
Nationality: Egyptian
Project title: Community of Fishermen in Minyat al Murshid – Egypt: Between Shame and Honor; An Imagined Construct of Masculinity
Nationality: Syrian
Project Title: The Self and Society in the Oral History of Syrian Refugee Women in Lebanon: Syrian Oral Histories – the Case Study of Dawlaty Project
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Women in the Religious Institutions: Between Producing Knowledge and the Impact of Stereotypes
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Myth of False Chastity: No Dignity in Mutilation – the Struggle Against FGM is Not Over Yet.
Asmae Benadada is Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Dhahir Al Mehraz, University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez, Morocco. She specializes in Women’s Studies and Political Sociology. Benadada’s publications include “Women and Politics: Sociological Study of Women Partisan Sectors” (2008). She contributed to a number of edited works, including, “Le mouvement des droits humains des femmes au Maroc: Approche historique et archivistique” (2015). [The Women’s Human Rights movement in Morocco: A Historical and Archival Approach] (2015) She has also published a number of research papers in national and Arab journals specializing in women’s issues.
Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University and activist for women’s rights. She previously held the position of Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University (2005-2011), and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. She was Carnegie Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University in 2014-2015. In 1995, she co-founded the Woman and Memory Forum, an Egyptian research organization that focuses on the production of knowledge on gender in Arab cultural history. She is currently the Chairperson of the Board of Governance of the organization. Her research interests are in the areas of gender in Arab cultural history, women’s rights, and oral narratives.
Lamia Moghnieh is a EUME fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and a former ACSS postdoctoral fellow. Her book project “Psychiatry in Lebanon from the 19th to the 21th century: Madness, Violence and Society” traces the cultural authority of modern psychiatry in Lebanon, through primary analysis of archival documents from the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders (popularly known as Asfuriyeh hospital) and ethnographic research on contemporary psychiatric practices.
Islah Jad is an Associate Professor and lecturer on gender issues and politics at the Women’s Studies Institute and Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University. She managed the program from 2008 until 2013 and is acting Director for the year 2021. She is a founding member of the university’s women’s studies MA program and a founding member of the first Ph.D program in Social Sciences at Birzeit. She has written books and papers on the role of women in politics, Palestinian women and the relationship between women, Islam, and NGOs. Dr. Jad is also a consultant on gender issues to the United Nations Development Programme and is co-author of the UN’s Arab Development Report on Women’s Empowerment and author of three other books. Dr. Jad received her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2004.
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: This Pregnancy is Null: Abortion and Gendered Resistance in the Egyptian Context
Nationality: Syrian
Project Title: Curses as a Tool of Feminist Resistance: Who am I?
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Gendered Resistance in the Face of Death: Challenging the Division of Labor and Space Exclusion in Funeral and Burial Rituals in Egypt
Nationality: Tunisian
Project Title: Informal Work for Women in Marginalized Neighborhoods in Tunisia: Cooking as a Tool of Resistance
Nationality: Palestinian
Project Title: A liberal Mini-project on a Piece of Fabric
Nationality: Tunisian
Project Title: Militer et transmettre : Une étude des frictions entre « générations » de féministes
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Sexual Harassment and The Connective Self: Her Shame is Their Shame
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Impact of Ride-hailing Services on Women’s Mobility in Cairo
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Spaces of Resistance: Women Maneuvering the Sha’bi Notions of El-Khalifa Neighborhood
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: One Body and One Hundred Million Eyes: On the Power of Community Surveillance and Low Profile Resistance in the Realm of Cairene Women’s Sexual and Bodily Agency
Hoda Elsadda is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, activist for women’s rights and founding member of the Woman and Memory Forum (www.wmf.org.eg). She previously held the position of Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. She was Carnegie Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University in 2014-2015. Her research interests are in the areas of gender studies, comparative literature and oral history. She is author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (Edinburgh UP and Syracuse UP, 2012); and co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers, 35:1, 2018).
Sawsan Abdulrahim is an Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Promotion and Community Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, at the American University of Beirut. She obtained her doctoral degree from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Abdulrahim’s research focuses on social inequalities and health, the social and cultural meanings of subjective health evaluations, and the structural conditions that influence the wellbeing of labor migrants and refugees. Her previous work has focused on the social determinants of health of Arab immigrants in the United States and migrant domestic workers in the Arab region. Currently, she is undertaking research on the health of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon, with an emphasis on reproductive health outcomes and early marriage. She teaches courses in health promotion theory, forced migration and health, and global public health.
Deema Kaedbey is a writer and researcher. She is the co-founder and the managing partner of the feminist organization in Beirut, the Knowledge Workshop. She is also a member and a co-editor of the feminist collective and webspace, Sawt al Niswa, where she publishes many of her writings. Her work explores queer feminist frameworks that construct alternative and inclusive histories of feminism in Lebanon and that examine connections between historical and present moments of women’s activism. She has a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Ohio State University, and an M.A in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Deema is also currently a consultant at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, coordinating its Critiques of Power working group.
Maroua Marmouch holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France (2015), following a Master in Cultural Anthropology in Italy (2011) and a Master of Philosophy in Tunisia (2003). Her research focuses on “sexual minorities” in a non-Western context, their visibility and their strategies of resistance. As part of her PhD, she conducted ethnographic research on an island of the Pacific Ocean, New Caledonia, and focused on transgender people. As an ACSS Postdoctoral fellow 2017-2018, her research focused on Lebanon and examined the ways in which women construct and negotiate their homosexual practices in Beirut. Her research is currently oriented towards strategies of mobilisation of sexual minorities in Lebanon, and the study of their recent visibilisation in the public space.
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Portrayals of Power and Appropriation in Egyptian Women-Only Spaces
Nationality: Moroccan
Project Title: Sexual Violence within the Marriage Institution
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Gendered Resistance: Young Feminists and the State in Egypt
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Counter-Sectarian Resistance: Mobilizing Gendered Identities to Negotiate Sectarian Hegemonic Power in Lebanon
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Reproducing Masculinity: Exploitation and Resistance within the Moral Economy of Domestic Work in Egypt
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Non-Participatory Gendered Resistance: Reactions towards Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Abandonment Campaigns in Egypt
Nationality: Palestinian
Project Title: Complete Empowerment of Abused Girls and Women in Palestine
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: May Ziadeh – The Story of the Story
Paul Amar served from 2011-2013 as lead researcher on the project “Societal Violence and Alternative Security Practices” at Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. In the past, he served as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Cairo University’s Department of Economics and Political Science, worked with the United Nations on conflict and development issues in the Middle East, cooperated on urbanism and public space research at the CEDEJ in Egypt, and was awarded fellowships for study at the American University in Cairo and the University of Marrakesh, Morocco. In 2003, he co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Federal University Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He currently serves as Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Amar’s research, publishing, and teaching focuses on the areas of state institutions, security regimes, social movements, and democratic transitions in the Middle East and Latin America, and traces the origins and intersections of new patterns of police militarization, security governance, humanitarian intervention, and spatial transformation in the megacities of the global south. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Security Archipelago (2013).
Hanan Sabea is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Sabea’s interest in anthropology started in Egypt, where she got her BA and MA at AUC, working on issues related to development, resettlement of populations and political economy of developing countries. After nine years of working in research and development projects in Egypt and North Africa, she shifted interest to Sub-Saharan Africa, primarily East and Southern Africa where she conducted research in Tanzania, South Africa, and Mozambique. Her experiences in both North and sub-Saharan Africa were instrumental in defining one of her broader intellectual concerns, namely how the very category of Africa has been historically constructed as an object of knowledge and as a cultural-political entity subject to a long history of interventionist policies.
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Tamarrod Movement: Nasserism as Seen by Its Actors
Nationality: Algerian
Project Title: Cartoons and Social Movements in Algeria
Nationality: Algerian
Project Title: Models of the Nation in Algeria: Paradigms for Integrating Diversity
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: The Arab Nahda and the Nation Form: Debt, Morality, and Universalism
Nationality: Algerian
Project Title: Nationalism in the Face of Neo-regionalism: The Arab Maghreb Union as a Case Study
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Political Elites and Their Role in Shaping Nationalism
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: “Nationalizing” Gender in Egypt
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Challenging the Naturalized Paradigms of Political Development: The Case of the National Association for Change in Egypt
Nationality: Tunisian
Project Title: Does Ennahda Party Represent the “Authentic” Tunisian Nation?
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Protest Movements and the Creation of Political Opportunity in Egypt
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Concept of the Civil State: Reconstructing the Collective Understanding of the Concepts of Citizenship and Human Rights in the Egyptian Post-Revolution Media
Paul Amar served from 2011-2013 as lead researcher on the project “Societal Violence and Alternative Security Practices” at Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. In the past, he served as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Cairo University’s Department of Economics and Political Science, worked with the United Nations on conflict and development issues in the Middle East, cooperated on urbanism and public space research at the CEDEJ in Egypt, and was awarded fellowships for study at the American University in Cairo and the University of Marrakesh, Morocco. In 2003, he co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Federal University Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He currently serves as Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Amar’s research, publishing, and teaching focuses on the areas of state institutions, security regimes, social movements, and democratic transitions in the Middle East and Latin America, and traces the origins and intersections of new patterns of police militarization, security governance, humanitarian intervention, and spatial transformation in the megacities of the global south. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Security Archipelago (2013).
Mona Fawaz is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Studies and the Coordinator of the Masters in Urban Design, Planning and Policy programs in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut. She was trained as an architect (BArch, 1995, American University of Beirut) and urban planner (MCP in 1998, PhD in 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research stems from the imperative of making cities more inclusive, particularly from the perspective of enabling low-income dwellers to take part in their making. She has researched informal settlements, large-scale planning projects, and public regulations of the built environment from the critical perspectives of inclusion and enabling. More recently, she has become interested in property conceptions and property regimes as key determinants of the outcome of planning projects. Her recent publications include: “The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah’s Reconstruction of Haret Hreik as Case Study” in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, manuscript accepted, forthcoming 2013; “Towards the Right to the City in Informal Settlements,” in T. Samara, S. He and G. Chen (ed.), Locating the Right to the City in the Global South, London, Routledge, 2013; “Living Beirut’s Security Zones: An Investigation of the Modalities and Practice of Urban Security”, City and Society 24(2): 173–195., 2012 (with Mona Harb and Ahmad Gharbieh), and “Exception as the Rule: High-End Developments in Neoliberal Beirut,” Built Environment 36(2): 245-259, 2010 (with M. Krijnen).
Hesham Sallam is a fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is a doctoral candidate in government at Georgetown University and co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine. He is former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013).
Nationality: Sudanese
Project Title: The Gendering of Spaces and Institutions of Islamic Sovereignty in Contemporary Sudan
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: The Problem of Legislative Authority in the Modern Egyptian State
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Evicting Sovereignty: Old Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Neoliberal State-Building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Nationality: Egyptian
Project Title: Sovereignty, Territorialization, and Tourism in Sinai
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Arab States in the Shadow of Popular Uprisings
Nationality: Lebanese
Project Title: Contesting National Authority in the Construction of Public Space: Spatializing Communal Sovereignty in Dalieh
Nationality: Bahraini
Project Title: Rethinking Sovereignty in Revolutionary Times: The Case of Bahrain
Nationality: Tunisian
Project Title: Dis-associative Sovereignty from Below: State Feminism and the Politics of Women against Women in Tunisia
Nationality: Algerian
Project Title: The State, Sovereignty, and Union Movements in Algeria: Independent Unions as a Model