Courses
310 courses since 2014
What we cover at CILAS matters less than what a student discovers.
86 courses
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Women's Writing and the Literary Canon
"وكتاباتنا الإبداعية بالتالي تختلف عن كتابات الرجل الذي ينتمي لنفس المجتمع الذي أنتمي إليه، قد تتساوى فنيًا، وقد تتميز، وقد تختلف، ولكنها في كل الحالات تختلف، فلم كان من الصعب علينا الإقرار بهذا الاختلاف؟" - لطيفة الزياتعندما كنت أتساءل لماذا لا توجد شاعرة عربية حديثة أنتمي إل…
View course - 43
Vocabularies of Grief
As the world slowly attempts to emerge from the shadow of COVID-19, we find ourselves still trying to navigate living within waves of loss. None of us, it seems, have been left untouched by the turmoil of the past few years - and yet, life continues, as it always has. In the a…
View course - 44
The Modern and the Mediterranean: The Age of Enlightenment in Europe and the Middle East
One might say that the Enlightenment changed everything. It is credited with fashioning the intellectual foundations of modernity, bringing reason and science to the forefront of public life, hastening the end of the ancien regime, pioneering constitutional government, sparkin…
View course - 45
CITY & CINEMA
City and the cinema have always been interlinked. While the cinema represents an image of the city, its people and spaces, it simultaneously plays a major role in the production of its space. The relation between the city and the Egyptian cinema, dates to its early days. When…
View course - 46
What is the State? An anthropological inquiry
The question of what is the ‘State’ and how it operates has always been central to social sciences as much as the state itself has been central to living in modern societies. Social scientists, activists and radicals have for decades disagreed widely on the nature, role, and e…
View course - 47
Magic and Modernity: The Spell of Our Structures
The course will challenge the conventional notion of equating modernity with disenchantment, through looking at the ways in which the secular and the sacred go hand in hand. We will examine how reason does not eliminate “superstition" but piggybacks upon it; chance and serendi…
View course - 48
Reading Films: A Rudimentary Guide to Cinema and the Moving Image
Have you ever watched a film and couldn’t describe how you felt because of it? Did a film ever leave you in awe? When watching a film, do you leave your mind at home, or does the film make you more and more conscious of your cognitive processes? Does reality inspire films, or…
View course - 49
Other Worlds are Possible: Quotidian Prefigurations
The concept of prefiguration encapsulates the project of creating a new or alternative society from within the current configuration of the world. Prefiguration functions as a theory in action, or the creation of an otherwise or alternative world that emerges from how one live…
View course - 50
The Death of the Political?
Saramago’s (2006) Seeing, offers a precise visualization of the current political plight that number of scholars have noticed and predicted. In an imagined country, during counting the ballots of the general elections, the city administrators found out that the populace have s…
View course - 51
PLAY THE CITY! - The case of Historic Cairo
Over the last few years, technological developments have allowed new possibilities for fostering civic participation and engagement, as testified by various smart city experiments. In this framework, game elements are diffusely mobilized in order to develop responsible and act…
View course - 52
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The Politics of Language and Alphabets: History, Power, and Community
What lies behind the languages and alphabets we use? Although they may appear as mundane and neutral means of communication, languages and scripts have functioned, historically and today, as powerful social, cultural, and political tools. Since the nineteenth century, imperial…
View course - 54
Killjoy: A Guide to Everyday Feminism
In the past few years discourses around feminism centered on the rise of rape/harrasment survivors’ testmonials have spread on social media. The use of the term “feminism” has become wide-spread and a mining field for different memes with the stereotype of the loud angry femin…
View course - 55
Egypt's Surrealists, the Avant-Garde and the Sixties Generation
This course will explore the different iterations of the avant-garde in Egypt across the 20th Century, their historical specificity, and political orientations. Avant-Garde artistic and literary movements in Egypt stand out because of the importance domestic and international…
View course - 56
Community Wellbeing and Resilience; Introduction to Community Psychology
During the last few years, mental health started to be an essential topic. Mental Health is not discussed only in theory or as a luxury but rather as a necessity to thrive and pursue meaning and purpose in life. Saying so, we usually connect Mental Health to individuals but in…
View course - 57
Ab/Uses of the Erotic
How has the erotic been deployed as a colonial and racializing technology? How might the erotic scramble, however fleetingly and flimsily, the coherence of racialized and colonial relations? Lingering with this dialectic of ab/use, we consider how the erotic has been aesthetic…
View course - 58
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Ethnography and the Politics of Storytelling
Why do we write ethnography? And for whom? What are the forces that we address while writing? In this course, we will read ethnographic accounts that cover various issues in Egypt in specific and the Middle East in general. In doing so, we will grapple with two schools of thou…
View course - 60
Science in the Middle East: A Socio-historical Perspective
Never has a vaccine ever been developed as fast as the COVID-19 vaccines have recently been. Ironically, only what can match this unprecedented scientific breakthrough is the unprecedented hesitancy and rejection that the vaccines were met with in different countries, most not…
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