Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East

Raed El Rafei
Film and Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz

Ingy Higazy
Politics
UC Santa Cruz

The end of 2020 marked ten years since the spark of the Arab Spring. Over these years of uprisings against authoritarian regimes, people have continued to face upheaval and crises across the Middle East: from ongoing wars and conflicts, increased repression, and new forms of fundamentalist militarism, to economic collapse. But beyond this prevalent story of instability and turmoil lie other narratives, dreams, affects, and movements. This multi-disciplinary research cluster draws from feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to challenge totalizing historical views of upheaval in the Middle East and investigate the unseen and generative traces of long-term change, imaginations, and modes of becoming ushered in by Arab uprisings. By exploring everyday affects, hidden forms of resistance, uncharted physical and symbolic mobilities, and counter-cultures/narratives, we propose alternative readings and mappings of the Middle East that attend to the “elsewheres” of upheaval. In this endeavor, we collaboratively rethink and re-theorize conceptual frameworks of both upheaval and the Middle East, and create an ongoing public archive that attends to concealed affective modes, and to hidden or erased presents and histories in a geopolitically charged region of the world.

Learn more about the project in this Foundry interview with Ingy Higazy and Raed Rafei and listen to their podcast.