Graduate Student Research Presentations

RESEARCH TOPICS

Mariz Kelada: My research on and with the workers of the Egyptian media industry re-shifts the theoretical focus from the end products of media to the sociopolitical infrastructural processes involved in their production. The production of subjectivities, be it in relation to Islam, nationalism, or modernity, etc., has been one of the focal concerns of anthropological inquiries on the MENA's cultural production. On the other hand, there is still a significant lack in engaging with the region, especially its cultural production, anthropologically or otherwise via political economy (Abu-Lughod 1989, Deeb and Waniger 2012, Altorki 2015). This indicates the necessity for an analysis attentive to the categories of labor and the economy to highlight cultural production's politics not only on the symbolic and discursive registers but in the actual trenches of everyday laboring lives that produce 'culture.' This, I suggest, poses a possible way out of the foreclosure that I find in theories of resistance, which cast political subjectivity either in association with formal labor and organized social movements, microcosms of quotidian struggles, or the avant-garde artistic ventures.

Julia Gettle: Pending.

Samee Sulaiman: My research is on the disability rights movement in Lebanon and how it applies a global disability rights framework in pursuit of its goals in the context of a postcolonial state suffering from a myriad of acute and long term crises. The disability rights movement in Lebanon began with the founding of the Lebanese Sitting Handicapped Union (currently the Lebanese Union for People with Physical Disabilities) in 1981, six years into the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Over the decades LUPD became the largest disability organization run and founded by disabled people in the country as it contended with the various interconnected crises including civil war, sectarian politics, foreign occupation and intervention, reconstruction, invasions, assassinations, and a state incapable of or unwilling to implement and enforce its own laws. In this presentation, I will outline some of the intricacies of how LUPD has contended and continues to deal with these challenges. I will briefly cover some of these historical challenges and then focus on how LUPD’s work has had to adapt since the October 17th uprising of 2019.