Laila Shereen Sakr
UC Santa Barbara
May 24, 2022
Arab Council on Social Sciences
Beirut, Lebanon
hacking (tahkir, iktiraq)
leaking (tasrib)
revealing (ifsha), proliferation (tafashshi)
and exposure and scene-making (fadh)
Enfoldment and Infinity (2010)
Hanan al-Cinema (2015)
The term algorithm predates the digital computer by over a thousand years, with an etymology traceable to the Islamic scholar al-Khwārizmī. How can we understand the explosion of discourse about algorithms in popular culture in the last decade?
Twitter has been credited for the successful mobilization of demonstrators after the elections in Iran.The U.S. StateDepartment allegedly intervened in its Twitter maintenance schedule to ensure that the service would be available to Iranians on their election day. Whereas Twitter, YouTube, and Flicker were used to disseminate news from Tehran and other Iranian cities. proxy servers were set up for activists to circumvent Iran's tightly controlled internet infrastructure.
Mottahedeh, Negar (2015) #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Kefaya is the unofficial moniker of the Egyptian Movement for Change, a grassroots coalition which prior to the 2011 revolution drew its support from across Egypt’s political spectrum. It was a platform for protest against Hosni Mubarak’s presidency and the possibility he might seek to transfer power directly to his son Gamal; political corruption and stagnation. While it first came to public attention in the summer of 2004, and achieved a much greater profile during the 2005 constitutional referendum and presidential election campaigns, it subsequently lost momentum, suffering from internal dissent, leadership change, and a more general frustration at the apparent inability of Egypt’s political opposition to force the pace of reform.
"Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere:
Politics, Culture, and Dissent" Etling, B. et al. (link)
(link)
@vj_um_amel
By VJ Um Amel
Lecture for UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies
