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The Ordinariness of Ethics and the Extraordinariness of Revolution: Ethical Selves and the Egyptian January Revolution at Home and School.
The Sullivan Lounge
AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74, New Cairo, 11835, Egypt
21
Registered
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Join us for an exciting talk with Ramy Aly, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Anthropology Unit at AUC, as he discusses his article, which focuses on the heart of revolution—not through the lens of street protests or political upheaval, but via the intimate narratives of those who came of age in its shadow.
In the article, Dr. Ramy Aly presents experiences of Egyptians who were too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. Today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. None claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, yet they are animated by it in complex and long-lasting ways. The January revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. Yet, there is more at stake than the political endgame. Dr. Aly, turns his attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. These accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution, where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions.Speakers
Ramy Aly
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Anthropology Unit Head
The American University in Cairo
Ramy Aly joined the Anthropology program at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2013. Before coming to AUC, he was a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK where he received his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2011. Aly's PhD research culminated in the publication of his first monograph, Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the undoing of identity, in 2015 with Pluto Press as part of their celebrated Anthropology, Culture and Society Series. The book is the first ethnographic account of gender, race and class practices among British-born and raised Arabs in London and attempts to provide an account of the everyday experiences of Arabness in the British capital. He is also co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas (2022).
He is currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first explores the formation of ethical selves in the wake of the January revolution (2011). The second focuses on contemporary racial formations in Egypt by looking at the hair cultures of young Egyptians. Aly is a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK, the European Association of Social Anthropology and The Society for Cultural Anthropology.
Aly supports students at AUC through his involvement with a number of writing initiatives. He is the chair of the Altorki Award for Ethnographic Research. He is also a co-founder of The Authors’ Challenge and has been the faculty advisor for the AUC Times.