The working group on Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space, Media, and Participation (ProdPub) was launched in 2013 and focused on public spheres in the Arab region and the ways in which the various social and political movements and upheavals across the region have transformed such spheres. As a multidisciplinary group, members explored the new possibilities, spaces and means for political action and practice in different Arab societies that bring to light and create new publics.
ProdPub concluded its activities in 2015.
The working group has three sub-groups coordinated by the following scholars:
Each sub-group has five to seven members working on different projects. They engage in regular dialogue with each other, and come together periodically in joint meetings with members of the other sub-groups.
The Space Working Group is coordinated by Professor Paul Amar (University of California, Santa Barbara).
This Working Group researches public spaces and spatializing embodiments that reverse class, sectarian, and gender segregation, foster social equalization, revive previous intersectional public subjectivities, and/or create future utopias. The research explores the context and legacies of the “Arab Spring”-era events, while largely (but not exclusively) focusing on countries identified more with war and counterrevolution rather than with the triumphant social uprisings of 2011. Thus, the research aims to bridge gaps between analyses of spaces of war and armed intervention (in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Bahrain, etc.), and embodiments of future hope, inclusion, and justice across the Arab region.
Exciting work has been done in the last generation shedding critical light on regimes of power, cultures of fear, and technologies of planning that have transformed public spaces. This work has focused on deconstructing neoliberal policies and discourses, exposing the techniques and economies of war and occupation, and articulating the spatial dimensions of postcolonial moral, ethno-sectarian, and religious regimes. This generation of scholarship has asked: How have social classes have been polarized by new kinds of space and public morality; how have built forms and spatial performances exacerbated sectarian divisions or even “invented” them; how have regimes of public-space regulation instituted regimes of puristic or pietist morality; and how have shifting norms of public-versus-private space restricted gender identities and issues of sexuality to an ever-narrowing private sphere where consumer and patriarchal values dominate. However, this set of research innovations have tended to neglect the kinds of spatial practices, movements, public embodiments, and policy regimes that can reverse or generate spatial alternatives that counter these segregatory dynamics and territorialization practices.
In this light, “Producing the Public: Spaces of Struggle, Embodiments of Futurity” aims to produce a new body of comparative case studies. This Working Group is oriented explicitly toward positive alternatives, even in the most fraught contexts, and will offer new analyses of spatial and historical relations of power, war, control, and subjectivation.
The Space Working Group has five members working on individual projects.
Paul Amar: Popular Embodiments and Public Morality in Libya and Egypt
Omar Dahi: Civil conflict in Syria: Fragmented Refugee Publics and the Political Economy of Survival
Mona Damluji: Socio-Spatial Networks in Education City: Futurity, Liberalization, and New Urban Publics in Qatar
Adnan Husnein: Poetics of Informality in Laboring New Libya: Spaces of Struggle, Inclusion, and Dialogue
Mohamed El-Shahed: Besieged Publics in the Shadow of a Mega Project: The Manufacture of Urban Uncertainty in Port Said
The Media Working Group is coordinated by Professor Tarik Sabry (Westminster University).
This Working Group brings together Arab scholars specializing in anthropology, art criticism, geography, media and cultural studies and philosophy to think through and produce critical, innovative and publicly engaging research examining the connections between media, time and publicness in both urban and rural settings in different parts of the Arab world, including: Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A key focus of this group program is to examine manifestations, meanings and transformations in mediations of ‘public-ness’ and how these can be products of not only locally produced ‘time structures’ but also the result of intersections between ‘local time’, ‘national time’ and ‘world time’. By ‘public-ness’, we mean the discursive/performative and intentional techniques that are used by the media and other forms of artistic/symbolic expression to generate a sense of belonging to a common culture/public and a common time.
The interdisciplinary approach of the program provides space for Arab researchers from different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences to engage dialogically and critically with the question of public-ness and time within wider debates on art, media, philosophy, globalization, modernity and post-modernity. The Working Group takes special interest in examining how different localized and globalized forms of ‘public-ness’, mediated through technologies of seeing through different structures and predispositions of time. The research outputs consist of ethnographic diaries emerging from fieldwork conducted in rural and urban parts of the Arab world; philosophical writings tracing transformations in the relationship between the Arab Intelligentsia and the masses, as well as visual material including two documentaries and a photographic exhibit (both accompanied by written text/commentary).
The Media Working Group has seven members working on individual projects:
Tarik Sabry: Media, Time, and Publicness in a Moroccan Amazigh Village
Ramy Aly: Visibility and Publicness: Publics, Counter-Publics, and Neo-Nasserism
Abdulaziz Boumeshouli: Philosophy and the Arab Mobilizations: “New Philosophical Experiments in the Arab World”
Layal Ftouni: Intersections in Time and Space: Arab Art between the Modern and the Contemporary
Joe Khalil: Developing Media in Times of Uprisings: Tempos of Cultural Politics
Amina El-Mekaoui: The Production of Public Discourse about the Moroccan Community in Transnational Space: The Immigrant in Local Media and Public Spheres in Spain
Helga Tawil-Souri: Dis/Formations of Palestine
The Participation Working Group is coordinated by Professor Sherene Seikaly (University of California, Santa Barbara).
The last two years of political upheaval and resistance in the Arab world have revealed new possibilities for social change. Scholars of the Middle East have grappled for several decades with what seemed to be the death of “formal” or “official” politics in their attempt to explain the seemingly impenetrable force of authoritarianism and the pacification of Arab politics. Some work reified older understandings of the idea of agency and the centrality of state institutions. Others broke new ground on the idea of the individual, critically deconstructing the seemingly self-evident meaning and universal value of “freedom” and “agency.” In some ways, both conventional and cutting edge approaches worked to obscure the possibility of politics that could effectively challenge authoritarian structures. What emerged was a lachrymose epistemology of despair. The Arab uprisings seemed to offer a way out of this thinking. But epistemologies of despair continue to hold ground in many academic approaches, which insist on ringing the death knell of participatory politics. At the same time an epistemology of hope has taken new force. Activists, journalists, practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, techies, and performers have honed strategies and visions for the present and the future, centered on collective action.
The Working Group on “Participation” seeks to bridge the gaps between hope and despair by understanding actors outside academia as social theorists and by placing various kinds of social theorists in conversation. The basis for this conversation is a focus on the histories, experiences, representations, and potentialities of collective action and their relationship to shaping and experiencing various sorts of publics. Such a focus challenges the confines of “civil society,” and its purported lack in the Arab world, to more rigorously engage how collective action shapes and envisions the public. In critically engaging the very idea of the people, both through and against state power, intellectual hierarchies, and national movements, this Working Group will rethink notions and practices of popular sovereignty.
A publication entitled “Who Are the People? A Conversation on the Assemblages and the Archives of the People” by Sherene Seikaly was produced as a result of this sub-group’s research.
The Participation Working Group has six members working on individual projects:
Sherene Seikaly: A Protest of the Poor: On the Political Meaning of the People
Lina Attalah: Online Spaces: Parallel and Intersecting Realities
Ahmad Gharbeia: Digital Empowerment: Mapping for Localities
Pascale Ghazaleh: The Common Weal: Constituting National Resources in 19th Century Egypt
Hoda Elsadda: Neoliberalism in Higher Education in Egypt: Histories, Contestation, and Visions for the Future
Laila Shereen Sakr: An Egyptian Virtual Body Politic