By Georges Khalil
The uprisings in the Arab world have challenged traditional paradigms for understanding culture and politics in the region and have opened up new sets of questions in both spheres. The 2014 Summer Academy in Rabat on “Conflict and Mobility in the City: Urban Space, Youth, and Social Transformation” was part of an ongoing interest of the research program Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) in Berlin and the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) in Marburg in investigating the interplay between culture and aesthetical practices, new social movements and revolutionary processes in the Middle East.
The 2014 Rabat Summer Academy had been a follow-up of the EUME 2012 Summer Academy at the American University in Cairo, and of a series of seminars and workshops dealing with the current transformative processes in the Middle East and their impact on the scholarship on the region. Under the title “Aesthetics and Politics” the 2012 Cairo Summer Academy addressed “Counter-Narratives, New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World”. “Aesthetics and Politics” and “Culture and Politics” were also the themes of the regular EUME Berliner Seminar in the Winter Term 2012/13 and the Summer Term 2013. Seminar sessions included presentations by EUME fellows such as Tarek El-Ariss on “Fiction of Scandal: Literature, New Media and Revolutionary Politics in the Arab World” or round-tables on “Culture, Class, Youth, Performativity and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in the Arab World”, where a group of scholars from the CNMS in Marburg presented their work to colleagues in Berlin. Questions of the intellectual, the role of literature, and artistic production in the political process that had been addressed at the 2012 Cairo Summer Academy were further investigated in a joint EUME-CNMS workshop on “Commitment and Dissent in Arabic Literature since the 1950s” that took place on June 27-29, 2013 in Marburg. The proceedings of this workshop will be published in an edited volume under the same title by early 2015. Questions of conflict, violence and mobility in the cities around the Mediterranean are central questions of the regular “Urban Studies Seminar”, which is chaired by Nora Lafi and Ulrike Freitag (both Zentrum Moderner Orient) and organized in a cooperation between EUME and the ZMO.
The 2014 Academy in Rabat took up several threads and questions developed in these contexts and enlarged the focus on the city and urban studies, various forms of mobility and conflict, not only in the Middle East and North Africa but also in neighbouring regions or countries.
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