Charles Hirschkind

Charles Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. In his recent book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006), he explores how a popular Islamic media form?the cassette sermon?has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. He is also the co-editor (with David Scott) of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad an his Interlocutors (2005). Other publications include "Cultures of Death: Religion, Media, Bioethics" (Social Text 2008),  "Cassette Ethics, Public Piety, and Popular Media in Egypt." (Media, Religion, and the Public Sphere, eds. A. Moors and B. Meyer, 2005), "The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Cairo" (American Ethnologist 2001). His current project is based in southern Spain and explores some of the different ways in which Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe's Christian civilizational identity. This project has been funded through an award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Barbara Abrash

Barbara Abrash is a teacher, curator and independent producer. She is the director of public programs at the Center for Media, Culture and History and the Center for Religion and Media at New York University where, since 1986, she has taught a graduate seminar in media and history in the Public History Program.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Scholar of Sufism and Western Hermeticism and (under the pseudonym Hakim Bey) a well-known radical-anarchist social thinker. His books include Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights, 1993) and Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1998).

• Religion

Arthur Kroker

Arthur Kroker is media- en cultuurwetenschapper aan de University of Victoria in Canada. Hij houdt zich bezig met technologie, cultuur en theorie, Franse en Duitse politieke theorie, sociale wetenschappen en ethiek en biotechnologie. Samen met zijn vrouw Marilouise onderhoudt hij CTheory.net, het toonaangevende online magazine over technologie, media en cultuur, met artikelen, interviews, video's en recensies. 

Linda Herrera

Linda Herrera (PhD Columbia University, MA, American University in Cairo, BA UC Berkeley) joined the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Associate Professor and core staff  in the Global Studies in Education MA program in January 2011.  Prior to that she was a Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies (2005-2010) at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was Convenor of the Children and Youth Studies MA specialization. Her major research interests and writing are around issues of  Youth and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); critical ethnography of schooling; youth, employment and international development policy; democracy and education; and, more recently, youth, new media and Arab Revolution.

• middle east

Anonymous statement: Operation Egypt 

Dear Citizens of the World

Anonymous can not, and will not stand idly while people are being denied their basic rights and human liberties. Yet, there are still a lot of governments worldwide who fail to even aspire to the standard of freedom that was set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These governments believe they have the right and privilege to impose upon their own people an 'official' version of 'reality' which isn't in any way tampered by the truths of everyday life under which its citizens are living. Anonymous believes this is an outright crime which can not go unpunished.

• middle east,
• anonymous

Art and the Human 

The punk band Pussy Riot, which I belong to, is a musical group that conducts unexpected performances in different urban spaces. Pussy Riot's songs address topical political issues. The interests of the group members are: political activism, ecology, and the elimination of authoritarian tendencies in the Russian state system through the creation of the civil society.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison

From the Blogosphere to the Street: The Role of Social Media in the Egyptian Uprising 

While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter, and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media, activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

• middle east,
• blogosphere,
• street protest

I disagree with the indictment. 

The indictment says that I committed disorderly conduct motivated by religious hatred and enmity and by the hatred of Orthodox Christians. I fundamentally don't understand this statement. Our performance aimed to attract the attention of the Russian clergy and the rector of Cathedral of the Christ the Savior, patriarch Kirill. We are representatives of our generation, and we are at a loss after his actions and appeals.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison,
• women's rights

We are not surprised. 

We are not surprised.

We are artists, arts administrators, assistants, curators, directors, editors, educators, gallerists, interns, scholars, students, writers, and more—workers of the art world—and we have been groped, undermined, harassed, infantilized, scorned, threatened, and intimidated by those in positions of power who control access to resources and opportunities. We have held our tongues, threatened by power wielded over us and promises of institutional access and career advancement.

• politics,
• culture,
• art,
• sexual harassment

The Information war 

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

The Legitimacy of Illegality 

Webcasting often is seen as an alternative for experiments which would not be able to get a licence for ethertransmissions. The difficulty projects and broadcasting initiatives encounter when trying to get legal airspace has caused a limited view of the possibilities of working within the ether as such. It is already clear that connections between networks like the internet and the ether can be most interesting, but this is of course not the only reason to have a look at the possibilities of broadcasting more closely. The ether is still the easiest way to reach large numbers of people fast. We should always be aware it is there when we need it.

• politics,
• radio,
• tactical media