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EUME Berliner Seminar»Behind the Scenes: The Labor and Extramoral Politics of Egypt’s Media Production«
https://shorturl.at/Zli88
Mariz Kelada (EUME Fellow 2023/24),
Chair: Diana Abbani (MECAM / Forum Transregionale Studien)
This seminar will take place on-site at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin. Please register in advance via [email protected].«
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Academic investigations across disciplines are timelessly invested in cinema/media’s interrelation with societies, cultures, and subjectivities. However, the filmic apparatus necessarily erases any trace of the labor behind it in order to acquire its power. This leaves a pressing question: what can the inner processes and infrastructures of media-making reveal and defy about dominant understandings of media politics? Based on two years of multi-modal ethnographic research following the laboring lives of media’s technical workers in Egypt, this seminar will demonstrate that an attentive consideration of the labor of media can articulate an alternative kind of politics—an extramoral politics.“Extramoral”—neither moral nor immoral—emphasizes the contradictions and ambivalences of conduct that the global neoliberal economy imposes on political subjects through labor. By centralizing the popular notion of ‘Akl al’ ish,’ or ‘making a living,’ the project examines labor precarity and livelihood beyond notions of subjugation, dispossession, and oppression. The focal point of the seminar is an analysis of the labor relations of on-location filming in Cairo, which moves across different urban geographies, from the slum to the elite gated community. These labor relations defy the formal/informal binary and exemplify an understanding of politics that goes beyond, yet still accounts for, the exploitation, governance, and resistance paradigms. Simultaneously, the seminar delves into the conundrums of narrating these contradictions and ambivalences through methodological experimentation.
• Mariz Kelada is a EUME Postdoctoral Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Germany. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and an MA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, as well as an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from The American University in Cairo. Kelada's interdisciplinary research focuses on the political economies of cultural production and visual media, with a particular interest in issues of precarity, solidarity, and political subjectivities. Her work has been published in various journals including the International Journal of Sociology, MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), Film and Media Studies Journal SYNOPTIQUE, and the Journal of Anthropological Society of Oxford. She has been actively involved in Cairo's alternative cultural sector since 2010, working in various capacities ranging from project management and research to film production. Kelada is also the co-founder of Qaaf.Laam.Collective, an advocacy group that works towards improving work environments and labor conditions for cultural workers in Egypt.
• Diana Abbani is a cultural historian of the Modern Middle East. She is currently working as the science communication coordinator for the project Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin). Her research focuses on popular and material culture, the implications of social, political, and technological changes, as well as the emergence of music industries and entertainment in Beirut and Bilad al-Sham region.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin,Berlin, Germany