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Femmes, culture, et révolution égyptienne 2011

Un appel à contribution est lancé pour deux ateliers ‘Women, Culture, and the 25th January 2011 Egyptian Revolution’ qui auront lieu à l’Université de Manchester les 15-17 novembre 2012et au Caire en mars 2013. Date limite de proposition 24 juillet 2012.

This is a call for papers for two related workshops which will take place in November 2012 (at the University of Manchester) and in March 2013 (in Cairo). This project is funded by the CBRL-BRISMES Research Network (UK)<http://www.cbrl.org.uk/support.html>, with the aim of emphasising the leading role of Egyptian women activists, writers, and artists in the revolutionary process. In this context, we perceive the 25th January Egyptian Revolution as a process in the making: there were many important catalysts for the revolution over the past decade in Egypt manifested in a significant rise in street protests and demonstrations by large sectors in the society (e.g. government employees, students, factory workers); workers’ strikes in work places; and the expansion of a highly politicised youth culture through such forms of resistance as free expression on blogs, protest songs, vernacular lyrics and poetry, novels by new writers, and films by a new generation of filmmakers. Then the revolution was sparked on 25th January 2011 which brought to the fore a huge body of cultural output manifested in songs, slogans, graffiti, new blogs, documentary films, photographs, and various religious discourses. Throughout this ongoing process of resistance and revolution, women from all walks of Egyptian society have crossed age, gender, religious, and class barriers to contribute to and shape this revolution; yet their leading role has been severely undermined by conservative and counter-revolutionary discourses. One of the key questions which we want to examine through this project is the negotiation, contestation and re-configuration of the religious terms of reference dominating Egyptian politics today by women activists, including Islamically-oriented women. This is largely an uncharted area and it could potentially help us go beyond the reductive categories of the secular/religious binary in describing the protest movements before and after the onset of the Egyptian revolution. Thus, these two workshops aim to make visible and critically analyse women’s contribution to the revolution to underline how they have been influencing the cultural and political scene in Egypt. Another key aim is to link the Egyptian revolutionary process to other Arab and international contexts in order to develop a theoretical perspective on women, revolution, and political change. The revolution is still ongoing, or as the Egyptians have summed it up in one slogan: Sawra Mostamirra (The Revolution Continues…).

This project is run by Dr. Dalia Said Mostafa<http://staffprofiles.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/Profile.aspx?Id=Dalia.S.Mostafa&curTab=1>, Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Manchester) and Dr. Shuruq