Post-Doc, Faculty of Social Sciences
Loughborough University, Social Sciences
OECUMENE, Citizenship after Orientalism
About
My recently completed PhD critically examined Habermas’s concept of the public sphere in relation to the Arab world. The thesis analysed the ‘mediated-publicness’ of transnational news networks in the region through their representation and portrayal of the subject position citizen. The thesis also explored how citizens ‘enacted’ their citizenship in interactive theatre performances held across Jordan in the lead up to the November 2007 parliamentary elections.
This more expansive understanding of Arabic public spheres, in the plural, addressed the limitations of current academic debate in the field and identified how processes of contestation and negotiation within a cultural public sphere can be read as interventionist political acts. More particularly, the thesis revealed how Jordanian women narrated stories (of themselves and others) within performative, cultural public spaces as a means of disrupting socially-scripted gender roles. Therefore, rather than consider the Arabic public sphere as a single mediated product and assess it accordingly (as is current practice), the thesis argued that the Arabic public sphere should be conceived as multiple publics (an idea borrowed from feminist critiques of Habermas’s work) which converge and diverge (and influence each other) depending on evolving relationships of contestation and negotiation.
I have since become increasingly interested in the performativity of the cultural public sphere in the Arab world. Over the next three years, as a post-doc on the OECUMENE project ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’, I will examine how politics is performed and citizenship enacted in dramatic and literary traditions in the Arab world and how such acts can be understood as sites of intervention and disputation through which participants constitute themselves as political subjects.
