 Okay, good evening everyone. Welcome to the first of the lecture series and book launches for on the Tuesday night between 5.30 and 7.00 that is hosted by currently the Center for Palestine Studies that I chair and the Center for Iranian Studies. I'm Dina Matar. I'm from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Center for Global Media and Communication and I don't want to speak a lot. I'm just introducing the session and chairing it today because I'm really delighted to have my colleagues, friends, extraordinary scholars flying in from different parts of the world to come and you know speak to us today about a very important book at a very important time in contemporary history. And the title, Cultural Time and Publix in the Arab World is very interesting. Media, Public Space and Temporality. And I think I will not take time to talk about what it means because they will be speaking about it. But I would like to welcome all the speakers. I will introduce them from my left going towards the end. So I have here Dr. Tariq Sabri who's a leader in media and communication theory at Westminster University. One of my colleagues and friends and partners in crime. And then I have Dr. Omar Al Ghazi, assistant professor in media and communication at the London School of Economics. Again, another friend and partner. Rami Ali, assistant professor of anthropology at the American University of Cairo. And finally, Dr. Helga Darwil Suri, associate, are you professor or associate professor at the Department of Middle Eastern Islamic Studies at New York University. And they all work on areas that are very much what I have been involved in for a very long time. I'm kind of reaching the age where maybe leave it to younger people. And it's about you know the relationship between media culture and politics. But kind of thinking about it in a different way and way that looks at it from the perspective of the global south which is what we are interested in at SOAS. But of course this is about the Arab world. Currently today and this period we are in a period of turmoil as we know you know the Arab world is always embroiled in different times, publics and cultures perhaps. But I want to give the platform to the speakers and we're starting with Tariq who's going to tell us about the birth of the project. And then each of the speakers will speak for about seven minutes. And then I might have one question and then we'll open it up to questions to the audience. But basically you are spared the death by PowerPoint. We're going to have a lively discussion today and join me in welcoming our very distinguished panel. Thank you so much for coming. In few words in terms of the project and how it came about. But please do feel free to come in at any point because it's more of a group thing that we did together as a collective. But it's very important to mention that the research we did was funded by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. I don't know if you've heard of it, it's based in Beirut. And they were really generous in that they were not just interested in output. In fact they didn't expect us to have an output. What they were interested in is having scholars from the Arab world coming together meeting at different places in the Arab region and then discussing key and important issues of interest. And they were also really generous with the themes of research. I mean they were at first interested in media. So they wanted us to do something on media in relation to kind of the emerging historical moment. At that time it was 2012 when we were designing the whole project. And by the time we met for the first time it was 2013 in Marrakech. And I did say that our understanding of media studies is slightly different. We're more interested in a kind of a less deterministic and less presentist view of what media studies is. And it's not just about screens and the internet. It's about communication. It's about people. It's about artists, about philosophy. And all those things that tend to be kind of sidelined when we think about media studies. And they were generous with that. They were more happy for us to kind of experiment. And we intentionally formed as a group being interested in different areas. We had a Moroccan philosopher, Abdul Aziz Bumsuli, who joined us. Helga Tawil, Suri keeps telling me, I don't know what this media studies is really about. What is media studies? What kind of media studies are we doing? And I think I put you in the same kind of position. Arami is an anthropologist. But we also had an art critic with us at first. Le'alfitouni was interested in art, especially art in the Arab world. So, you know, if you think about the mix, it's not the kind of usual kind of media studies mix. So I thought I'd mention that. So they're working for us to discuss media from kind of a holistic kind of perspective, for more of a kind of a cultural studies perspective, as well. And I, with my colleagues, of course, put forward this notion of culture, time in the Arab world as a kind of a key theme. Because one of the key questions we asked right at the beginning is simply, what is my cultural time? You know, given the kind of the historical moment, the context we were going through. And as we discussed the project over, I don't know, at least a year, then new questions began to kind of emerge. For example, what is the relationship between time and culture? What is cultural time? In fact, what is the relationship between the temporal and time in itself? And is it true that new temporalities can lead to the emergence of new publics or vice versa? Right? So these were some of the questions we were rehearsing, and I emphasise the verb rehearsing. But the key question we were asking, and perhaps I think is the most challenging, is can we provide an anthropological or phenomenological interpretation of cultural time in the Arab context, rather than going for teleologically ideological or identitarian kind of positioning? And that's the kind of thread that has pulled us together, i.e., thinking about a different way of thinking about cultural time. We were keen to think of cultural time in an experiential and anthropological way. But these questions are not isolated. They are part of a larger idea and project. My colleagues are very familiar with, and this is something we've been working on for the last 10 years or so, and that's the idea of a critical Arab cultural studies. We were keen to understand and frame what a critical Arab cultural studies might look like. What kind of theory might inspire it and so on? And that's why we went back to Arab contemporary thought, especially the work of Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri. Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri, Moroccan philosopher, was one of the first people, from what I remember, who engaged in passing in his book, The Construction of the Arab Mind, engaged with this notion of cultural time and asked, does time have a culture and vice versa, and how can we philosophize the notion of Arab cultural time? Just so that I can put you in the context of the work of Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri. I have a quote here. It is kind of a quote against which we set ourselves, but it is within which we worked at the same time. This is Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri reflecting on the notion of cultural time. So in his work, Al-Jabri makes a systematic argument contending that the deficit in contemporary Arab culture was due to an unconscious and non-linear understanding of time. What was extremely interesting and informative for us as a group and as we have explained, was Al-Jabri's philosophical engagement with the category Arab cultural time. He uses Jean Piaget and this is what he says. The unconscious has no history since it does not acknowledge natural time. It has its own time which is different from unconscious time. The time of wakefulness and consciousness. And conscious time resembles to a degree dream time as it is unable to acknowledge temporal or spatial distances and orders, nor is it able to acknowledge the law of causality. The same can be said about cultural time and the time of a reason structure that belongs to a certain culture. Vast cultural time is like unconscious time in that it overlaps and extends in a spiral way, making it possible for many cultural phases to coexist in the same thought figure. And thus in the same reason structure just as repressed desires from different psychological and biological stages coexist in the gloominess of the unconscious. So Al-Jabri clearly sees non-linear time as a problem and as a deficit in Arab cultural time. We see it exactly in an opposite in oppositional way. In that actually non-linear time is very interesting. We kind of need to come to terms with understanding, rehearsing how non-linear cultural time works. So this is this kind of dehumanized objectivism that we're kind of trying to kind of move away from which is very specific to a kind of a historical moment which goes back to Shemal Ab-Nasr, Al-Wahda Al-Arabiya and so on and so forth, Arab nationalism and so on and so forth. We are trying to make the argument that new Arab temporalities are emerging and our role is to kind of make sense of them. And we do that, we argue through the prism and the lens of the everyday and everyday life rather than teleology or ideology. This in a nutshell is what I think pulls us together, but I'm hoping that maybe Rami or yourself, Omar, may want to add something to this before we go ahead with our short talks. I can talk about my chapter but also the thought process behind it and kind of how it fits in the book. So thinking about, thinking about the temporal context, it is I think important to acknowledge what questions do we ask in certain political moments. So when I started my PhD, I started in 2010 interested in media and the Arab world. Of course, by the end of 2010, the Arab uprisings began in Tunisia and that the first year of the Arab uprisings and also what ensued were happening and of course they influenced what I ended up writing about. And certainly it was a political moment that we thought with and against. And even when for instance I was reading academic texts about the Arab world, that was really kind of my entry point to engage with it. So my contribution in the book is an engagement with the cultural, political theorist, Lebanese theorist Mahdi Amel, who was also a committed communist. And his work basically was very much interacting with that cultural moment in the late 70s, particularly post, sorry in the early 70s, particularly post 1967, what is known as the NAXA in the Arab world, which is the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel. That was a political and cultural shock at the time. And reading it in 2011, 2013 with kind of the the effective roller coaster that happened with the Arab uprisings, the sense of exhilaration and hope in 2011, and then the sense of anxiety and defeat in 2013, when basically whether when Syria, what was happening in Syria, became a devastating war and in Egypt as well, the all the hopes of a new beginning open the door for renewed authoritarianism. And so working with these also the emotions of what that means and reading academic texts, that was like my entry point. So reading Mahdi Amel, I began to think about the key words that he used in particularly in one important book that which was it was called the crisis of Arab civilization or the crisis of the Arab bourgeoisie. And he Mahdi Amel was, he wrote his book in reaction to a conference that happened in 1974 in Kuwait, where he was criticizing a lot of or the majority of kind of Arab intellectual discussion at the time that he found to be very orientalist, self orientalizing in a sense. These are my terms, but that's in his book he criticizes the essentialism that that happened after 1967 in talking about some sort of malaise or cultural problem that's essential to the to Arab culture and the Arab mind. And he was arguing that in fact we have to think structurally about the what we call crisis in in the Arab world. We have to think about kind of the economic struggle that that produces a sense of crisis rather than looking for cultural answers that are essentialist. So I engage with with his work in thinking about key terms that he used and beginning kind of like asking a question opening opening it up to really historicize particular terms in Arab political culture. Basic terms even the idea the Arab or the Arab culture. How did he how did Mahdi Amel use it in reaction to his contemporaries and how do we use it today? So I select four keywords and influenced also by the work of Raymond Williams who's a British cultural theorist with this keywords approach to so I use that and brought Mahdi Amel with Raymond Williams so that you know you could read more about that in the book but I would say this is part of an ongoing project that I'm thinking about kind of thinking about important words that we use and not treating words as as static kind of holders of meaning rather especially in the Arab context where obviously it's in the Arab world it is a linguistic there's a linguistic commonality but that doesn't mean that one word that is used in Egypt has the same political connotation let's say than it does in Lebanon. So this is an ongoing project that I'm thinking about in really kind of excavating meaning of important words in in political culture and that is my take on how to think about the temporal contexts of politics so I'd leave it at that and yeah so I'll try also to just draw back because what I found interesting about the project was that we did not begin with temporality as being a concern in any way it just happened in a very roundabout way and it kind of goes back to what Amel was saying about crisis and the nature of crisis of course some people believe that life is crisis and that there is always crisis but at this particular moment in 2013 we start thinking about the project in light of what's happening in places like Libya and Egypt and Tunis obviously that first wave but then actually by the time we really started having some distance from that euphoria the second you know crisis comes up which is the first one let's say you know what happens in Tunis in Egypt is a crisis for the establishment and then by 2013 there's a crisis for those who associated themselves with the movements that overthrew that establishment in the first place and there felt it felt a lot like there was this vying for an ownership of what was happening you know should we call the 25th of January in Egypt you know lots of people like to think of as a disaster very similar to in Nexa yeah so lots of parallels between 1967 and 2011 right for for the cultural establishment for the political establishment this is the nature of the crisis that it's a complete meltdown if you like or an end of a particular relationship between the ruler and the ruled and then as the euphoria of revolution revolutionary change and you know the current of Alaska the street fades away we have a secondary crisis which is that we have the return of authoritarianism right so it really felt while we were trying to discuss what was happening that there was this tug of war over where these places were going in a sense and where they'd come from and it was interesting that Tareh Tareh is the one who actually introduced introduced me anyway to Eljaveri and I had not I had not read anybody who tried to formulate it's interesting his book is called The Formation of Arab Reason yes so he's trying to do this diagnostic work as in for him there's already a crisis right and when did he write it it was 80 89 right so for Eljaveri there's a crisis in Arab culture for us there's a crisis in Arab culture there seems to be this ever present sense of crisis in terms of you know how do we understand where Arab culture is and why why is the Arab world as it is and I think each person tried to pick up on the kind of ways in which that resonates in a particular context in my case I tried to do it in Egypt which was really really challenging at the time because there was a crackdown so my chapter focuses really on a a crackdown against civil society and cultural activism in November 2013 and 14 well I actually went from from the end of 2013 all the way through to the end of 2014 and what I felt was the case was that the the cultural activists had this kind of I mean I think I might have had rose tinted glasses on at the time but I felt like they had this forward-looking you know this future-orientated notion of what was possible to describe as Egyptian culture for example you know what could constitute Egyptian culture was something that looked very much into the future and not so much reliant on the past and this is one of Eljaveri's critiques is that Arab cultural time is in a sense synchronized in the past right as imagined in the past in this unconscious kind of reliance on Aturati and I kind of felt that one of the ways in which you could measure political contestation in Egypt at least was how people envisaged public culture and so my work I initially tried to go about doing ethnographic work in a village in Egypt and I wasn't able to do that because basically making an ethnographic film was something that would essentially criminalize you you know walking around the village with a camera at that time would put you and the people who you're supposed to be spending time with in a lot of danger potentially because there was this discourse about the crisis right having been precipitated by foreigners and foreign ideas and foreign agendas so the forward-looking culture that I was interested in which I'm calling in this chapter the January counterculture right so this group of you know lots of young people who are doing street performances cultural activism citizen journalism they're doing their own kind of archiving their own kind of photography their own kind of historiographic work about that particular moment those people become as threatening to the state as you know all the extent they actually became a national security threat for the Egyptian state so I was interested in the way in which they describe themselves and culture and I was interested in contrast in how the what Samia Mahrez she caused them the intelocrats right so how the state's cultural elite right it's kind of client cultural elite how they see culture and I wanted to kind of compare and contrast what that meant for this notion of cultural time of course lots of people and it's true to say I don't know how much time I've got left but somebody's gonna have to stop me when going over time lots of people talk about you know a kind of neo narcissism in Egypt you know the return of a narcissist vision of culture and it is absolutely true that a cc would love and has engineered a return of the cultural institutions and the cultural architecture to be within the control of the executive if you like and for them culture is simply about the production of or this is why I argue for the Egyptian establishment what they think culture is for is for the establishment of a cultured citizen soldier right that's what they want so they want you to be you can't just have a cultured citizen you need a citizen who is like battle ready but can only be battle ready if he or she has been in cultured in the correct way right which we might call it indoctrination or whatever so I started looking at how this kind of culture is a militarized culture how it's dependent upon ideas of cultural militarism and hashed right and I suppose the only outcome I mean the outcome of the chapter is to kind of discuss how difficult it is to do ethnographic work within that kind of authoritarian context where you are considered to be a spy or to have ideas that are threatening to the state but also it helped me to understand how people still operate in Egypt so a lot of these groups that emerged in 2011 are still operating operating and have this kind of insistence that they go on doing what they're doing but the way they do that is to kind of rather than spread the word it's like to contain the word so in terms of publicness and time although their future orientated their notion of publicness is to control their kind of their footprint in the public sphere so as not to attract the attention of the state and that's the way that they continue to operate and maintain the the kind of solidarity and ideas that they experienced around 2010 and 2011 so it ended up being about cultural time in a very roundabout way but yeah it was it was what I liked about it to be honest with you as an experience was to find out how people in the face of authoritarian rule and this kind of constraint this this pincer movement where you know people are being arrested production houses are being closed down theaters are being closed down people are being arrested on the streets for having cameras or notebooks or whatever how people still manage to continue doing their cultural activism in light of that and the chapter kind of uncovers some of the strategies that they used to do that thanks so I landed earlier today at Heathrow and I was and you're very advanced in the UK you know you have these automatic turnstiles now with cameras and so on so I looked and I saw that I could scan my passport and I could stand there between the two turnstiles and have my photo taken and the thing would open so I was really excited to try this of course I put my passport in and it didn't scan I turned it around I tried again and so on and I could kind of feel the people behind me a little bit like okay what is this woman doing like you know yellow come on yet moving and and then it started flashing right it said something like I don't know assistance needed or something right and so it was literally this moment where there is in in the case at Heathrow they're made of glass but there's these glass turnstiles in front of me that are refusing to open and there these glass turnstiles behind me that are also refusing to open and I'm stuck and the lights are flashing and I'm in a little bit of a panic but really probably more embarrassed than anything else because I'm the person that's holding up the line now I share this because in a way my chapter is precisely about what it means to be stuck inside a turnstile right and the turnstile that I'm writing about is not in Heathrow it is both a real turnstile at a checkpoint in Palestine but it's also kind of seeing Palestine itself as stuck in this turnstile so that pincer movement that that Rami was talking about right for me I just sort of took that and rather than feel the euphoria of 2011 2012 2013 even as it kind of dissipated I think I I'd like to sort of think of myself as like the pessimist in the group I was like but this isn't happening in Palestine right there's no revolution going on there's no way to even get out of the turnstile or get out of the checkpoint and so that's kind of where in a way I ended up and maybe it's also kind of where I started in that looking at you know what was what is being prevented in the case of Palestine was the sense of a public time right and I tried to kind of unpack what does that mean right and to have a possibility of of a political movement to have a possibility of public time I argue really requires you to be able to be in the same place at the same time with other people so that it is very territorial but it's also very embodied it's very phenomenological you have to kind of we have to be able to kind of share space together at the same time and if you are stuck in the checkpoint in between these turnstiles and there are nowhere as near as beautiful as the ones in Heathrow right the turnstiles in the checkpoints of Palestine so when you're stuck in in between those what does that actually do to the possibility of being a public so what my chapter does is it actually takes you in this kind of I don't know detail of what every single step that you have to take passing through a checkpoint and when the clicks of the turnstiles that are all automated you don't see the soldier the turnstile moves at its own pace and what does it actually do to a person to be stuck right and then move away or move beyond just sort of thinking about it from an individual perspective to kind of understanding that that sense of stuckness that sense of time being stuck in time right not having the power over time not knowing when that checkpoint or when that turnstile is going to open whether you can exit back or go forward and then whether you're going to be able to go through the next checkpoint because there's always another one whether it's farther down the road or tomorrow or on your way back what does that mean when we're talking about something like a nationhood or a kind of a public right and so you know I guess in short what I felt like what I was trying to express in the chapter at the beginning it felt like I felt like the odd person out and that I wasn't feeling this kind of euphoria of what was going on in in Tunis in Egypt sort of pre-2013 I guess you know today I feel like oh maybe it was sort of prophetic that I was the pessimist because it kind of felt like if I read the chapter today it's like nothing's changed and that was kind of the point right in that you can't actually have change when you don't have the particular mechanisms possible to kind of get you through a checkpoint or through a turnstile and so what was what I argue is kind of being prevented in the case of Palestine is not simply movement is not simply mobility and the ability to move from one place to another and it's not simply the possibility of economic growth or even political unity but it's actually the future possibility right so what is being prevented in the case of something like Palestine and if you think of Palestine as stuck in the checkpoint right is that you're taking a future away you're making that future something that you have no control over so I it's both metaphoric but it's also in the case of the way that that I write about it is kind of quite embodied and and very sort of specific to the the techniques and the technologies of of the particular checkpoint but I also kind of saw it early on and I remember telling Todd and and Rami and and the others that you know I I wanted to maintain the the right to be angry as a Palestinian and rather than sort of see the sense of hope I was like no I think sometimes we should be we should we should have the right to say no you know it it sucks and we are stuck in the checkpoint and here's how it's happening and here's how it looks and here's how it feels and here's how that kind of colonial technique of keeping you in place and keeping you stuck in time actually happens and so reading it now you know in reading it now sort of years later it's it's in a way sort of even more angering right because the the techniques and the technologies have only gotten more stringent and more impossible and more dire at the same time you know what you or here's another way of putting it is we are now seven days into 2020 which according to the UN is the year that Gaza has become unlivable right and so I think about it in the in the prospect of here I am in 2012 and 2013 already knowing that by 2020 the UN has declared Gaza as unlivable well it's not like it was very livable back in 2012 to begin with and so in a way it's kind of it's that future of it's that future of an impossible future that I was really trying to sort of deal with and in my chapter and I think that today it seems to sort of maybe echo a little more with some of the other cases that we saw. Thanks maybe I can just say a few words about my ethnography which I did in the Middle Atlas Mountains in a small village called Eid Nuh in Morocco when I did the research there there was not one mention of the revolutions not one mention the revolutions just to give you an idea as to kind of how these cultural temporalities differ and and usually when we talk about the Arab world so to speak I mean we don't mention Amazir or others so to speak they're usually on the margins but it's so geographically it was important for me to do some research there but again you know in terms of temporality there was no mention of of the revolutions but the thing that stayed with me is this kind of ethnographic thrownness when you are thrown into the field when you are thrown into doing ethnography that's that's when you begin to kind of you know make sense of what it is that you're that you're really after. In my case I went in with this kind of kind of hermeneutic interest in the notion of time and cultural time and I try to distill foolishly this still from the villages what the notion of cultural time is and then tie it with Bergeson and Heidegger and of course it was foolish of me to have done that. It didn't take me kind of much time to realize that I had to kind of you know sit down listen to what the villagers had to say to me about their understanding of cultural time thus I think thrownness as a category ethnography is very important. We never emphasize thrownness we always emphasize results findings and what we write about but thrownness is quite quite important. So I go to this village and I realize that there is a shrine there there's a kind of a marabout called the CDA So Nuh and I very quickly have realized that people stopped going there so what you do is you go to the marabout and you spend the night and then you expect this kind of divine communication to happen so you have a dream someone comes into your dream tells you something important you go and tell the villagers and that's how that's how it works but that ritual along other rituals that predate Islamic Christianity stopped so very quickly I have realized that although these kind of rituals stopped they lived somewhere else somewhere that I found that later was more mnemonic it was more of a mnemonic space where notions of identity and cultural time were negotiated negotiated in a kind of a mnemonic way mnemonic meaning where you become an editor of your own cultural time cultural temporality but not only that so I've also been told by the villages that dancing has become had become haram in in the village the mixing of men and women in the village was haram but you know people talked about the past and talked about how things were better how how weddings went on for three or four days how men and women danced ahidus ahidus is a very known amazeer dance you know known for this area called zayam in in in khanifra in aid nuh and so on and so forth so clearly I mean slowly I started to kind of look into this notion of cultural Salafism and and how cultural Salafism works so I went to one or two sermons Friday sermons and clearly the imam was making the point that visiting the marabout or the saint was haram because it was about the worship of the dead yet you know this is a ritual that was practiced in in in the village I'm sure for hundreds and hundreds of years is something that was left either by the Romans who were there for 700 years or or some other civilization but it simply predates islamic Christianity but what I've also realized as well and perhaps this is something that's referred to as alithia in I don't know any ethnographic moments two key moments happened when I first when I asked a 45 year old villager there what does time mean for you and I was really astounded by the answer he said time is the mountain you know so I mean because and this is where I began to kind of think more seriously about the non hermeneutic kind of approach to understanding time and cultural time so time for him was was was was about earthliness it was related to earth and space it was more specialized kind of time he he said you know when I was born the you know the mountain was there it's still here it'll be there once I'm gone so the mountain is the embodiment of time and time in itself so that for me was interesting and it provided an alternative to kind of engaging with at least making sense of how time or cultural time can can be explained the second moment came when I kind of probed a woman who was in her late 60s who when I first met her said you know how often do you go and visit the saint and you know what do you do when you go there and you know she hesitated and she said I don't actually go there anymore because what she did was to kind of think of me as one of these kind of young imams who go there door to door talking to them about Islam you know telling them again it's haram to worship the dead and all that I said look you know I'm you know I'm not very alien to this place I have a history here I have a family here I know this place I've been to the marabout my son and she opened up to me and then she said actually you know what I do go from time to time but they are ostracized now so if you're seeing going there people stop talking to you you're ostracized and then that got me thinking about how cultural how cultural selfism work it works by its attempt almost like nationalism of trying to singularize the whole notion of time where time becomes singular where time becomes a one thing rather than many things and and so clearly in her saying that I actually go means that there is at the everyday level at the anthropological level there are ways in which these villages are negotiating appropriating reappropriating different ways of navigating between different cultural times where they themselves become editors of their own own cultural time just to just to kind of end with this by way of kind of summarizing but this quite a bit to say time as I found out like all ontological phenomena can only exist through us and how we experience the things of the world as presence and since cultural time only generates meaning through a mnemonic act where we are editors of our own cultural times and new time is created that is neither local or global the day time and my time combined to create an agential new my time that troubles the border between the extensive and intensive and in that sense mnemonic time as I found out is always a new kind of time thank you so much I would like to start with a couple of questions to the panel and then I'll open the the discussion for questions and answers I was struck by two things I read the book and in a sense it is very varied in style in terms of methodology in terms of you know the context the temporal context but one of the things that struck me is the idea that we are thinking of cultural time and temporality at a time of excessive media and I was wondering whether you do any of you you know I've read the chapter so I know what you've been writing about but how you know the title the subtitle the title says media public space and and temporality so is there a way or is there a kind of conceptualization of media and excessive media that comes across in relation to cultural time and temporality through your research and through your kind of several sessions I came to one of them I was so lucky to be part of one of the early meetings in Beirut but so basically if you can respond to that in a sense because you know one of the things that keeps concerning me as someone who works in media and communication is how do we what is media you know in the sense you know where does media come in in and why does it need to be in the title so maybe a challenging question but maybe not so challenging for for you guys but anyone who wants to answer that please do so I don't look at media in the sense of you know a television set or radio or internet and so on right so for me it's really more about the process of mediation and that what is it that exists between us and communicates between us but probably here more than in some of my other work I actually relied on media theorists because media theorists are obsessed with questions of what is live what is synchronous what is asynchronous how do you communicate how do you get meaning how do you share with other people what does it mean to watch tv I don't know in the Atlas Mountains watching something that's I don't know Baywatch or some ridiculous show like that right and how do you make sense of watching something like that in a place that doesn't even share those conceptions of time and so on and so media theories if you will are sort of particular theories of of time and media are actually really helpful to think about this in that they they there is a way to kind of think about the different layers of time and I remember having a lot of discussions amongst all of us about you know there would be things like global or universal time and then they'd be national time they'd be television time and they'd be local time and they'd be like the imams time and and one way to sort of think about it was about how these could all coexist right so that you couldn't have different time different temporality the different time experiences that coexist at the same time right so that was one way that certainly for me media was kind of really helpful to to draw on anyone else yeah sure I mean mine was a bit more straightforward I was supposed to literally research the re-emergence of provincial newspapers after almost 70 years in Egypt and so it kind of made sense initially to think in terms of media right and what happened was that after the revolution after the January moment anyway people realized that this decentralization of representation and media generally speaking in Egypt was was something that had to be rolled back or the somehow needed to be mitigated so initially the the idea was to to kind of follow how villages you know were being were redefining themselves by being able to represent themselves for the first time in in decades but then as started started I mean you don't really want to in any way advocate a flat notion of what media studies constitutes and so in a way by insisting on on saying that street performance is media or that you know alternative histories that are then dramatized as also media or that literature as media or poetry as media all of those things constitute modes of mediation and modes of representation and cultural production so I think the idea was to kind of break open what media could be in this particular moment especially as there was a lot of interest in the internet obviously you know in 2010 and 2011 2012 as being the kind of emancipatory game-changing kind of media right and I don't think anybody actually ended up looking at the internet so there was no social media in this book which was kind of interesting but all these kinds of other more subtle if you like forms of cultural production thank you um yeah to to add I think um I I agree with Helga's approach to think about media mediation rather than media and I and in in this chapter but also in kind of my work in in general in thinking about how to do discourse analysis I think that there is an approach that that is influenced by media studies and thinking about what do words mediate and in a way like that's what I I started thinking about and thinking about the meanings of words that we tend to take for for granted so let's say one of the words revolution what would that what would that actually mean in in like what meanings did that mediate in the 1970s versus now and and this is something that I've continued to work on like let's say in in Syria in 2011 what what was the meaning of revolution because I I would argue that it changed from 2011 to 2015 so even though you know like this is not fleshed out and in this chapter but I think we tend because of because of all the saturation that we have with media when we take it literally as as screens we tend to kind of think about especially in the field of media studies in a very techno deterministic way rather than thinking about the mediation of of meaning which I think is something that we can take from cultural studies and media studies and and perhaps even like start to maybe develop a method of thinking about it in relation to discourse analysis as well thank you and I think maybe it should be fair to say that our default position was to go for a non-mediacentric approach to doing media studies and this is something that you know people like Shawn Moles and Dave Morley have been going on about for the last you know 20 years or so I did research you know not long ago in in Dahya in in Beirut and if you go to Dahya you know you know you just see what you lose out on if you just think that you could do research looking at satellite or tv or ipads whatever you know that Dahya is is is full of of visuals full of mediation and different types and processes of of mediation and I think you know media studies can be problematic when it only focuses on just screens and so on so so yeah the approach was to go for non-mediacentric approach having said that when I was in the village I really wanted to understand how or if it was possible that you know watching television especially by you know young people in their 20s whether watching television helped them re-temporalize their everyday life so I was looking at that notion of you know how how media can re-temporalize time for us and this is what you know media do so well but especially in you know kind of the broadcasting era so to speak but what what I did find out is that a lot of the girls and the boys I did research with who were watching I don't know South Korean drama Indian drama Latin American drama with some Moroccan drama as well no Baywatch sorry no Baywatch Baywatch that was that was my my first research Baywatch was really big in there it was the kind of Baywatch was modernity in in the village it was you know it was about Pamela Anderson you know so yeah so there was an attempt to kind of definitely kind of I could say that these audiences were using television to re-temporalize their daily schedules but at the same time it would be unfair to stop there because there was also a religious time there was also kind of other times the imam time as you mentioned and there was a kind of a confluence it's far more complex than just kind of thinking about media at the level of screens I'd say which is the approach that we like you know in many ways you know moving out of media-centric approaches