This special panel will address the challenges facing Egypt's transition today.

Dr. Maha Abdelrahman will speak on the historical roots of post-Mubarak politics by 
examining two main features of the decade long of protests since 2000.

Dr. Amr Adly will speak on how Egypt's economic crisis interacts with the shaping of the new political sphere, and whether this can be framed as Egypt's failed transition to democracy or transition to failed democracy. He will argue that the country was put on the trajectory of a conservative democratic order which indeed has been instilled but the only problem is that it is quite dysfunctional.

Ahmed Salah will discuss  the position of revolutionary groups toward Morsi's Regime and how and why it devolved.

Prof. Robert Springborg will present on "The Muslim Brotherhood and the Military: The Mongoose and the Cobra Revisited".

Prof. Joel Beinin will present on "Workers, Trade Unions, and Egypt's Political Future".

The panel is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

This event is presented by CDDRL and the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy

Esraa Abdel Fattah is Vice-Chairman at the Egyptian Democratic Academy.

* Founder of Free Egyptian Woman, a group for women’s political empowerment.

* Columnist at El- Masrey-Al-Youm newspaper, the most widely distributed, privately owned newspaper in Egypt, and has her own talk show on channel “On TV Life " every weekend.

* Co-founded April 6 General Strike Egypt in 2008, a Facebook group, to promote a day of civil disobedience calling for workers to stay home in protest against low wages and soaring food prices. After being dubbed the social-networking phenomenon “Facebook Girl”, she was detained by Egyptian security and spent two weeks in prison.

* Political Activist, played a leading role in the mass protests in Tahrir Square during the 25th January Revolution. She was not only active on the Internet, but also on the ground, updating Al Jazeera TV with the latest news related to the opposition.

* Named Woman of the Year 2011 by Glamour Magazine for her leadership in organizing the historic Tahrir Square movement in Egypt.

* Named as one of Arabian Business Magazine's 100 most powerful Arab women in 2011 & 2012.

* Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, 2011.

* Co-Founder and member of the Steering Committee in ElDostor Party , 2012. 

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Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Abstract:

Marking the publication of Lina Khatib's latest book Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, this seminar focuses on the evolution of political expression in the Middle East over the past decade, highlighting the visual dimension of power struggles between citizens and leaders in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

About the speaker:

Lina Khatib is a co-founder and Program Manager of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She also edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010. She is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2012) published by the UNDP.

She has written two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (IB Tauris 2006), which is a study of the link between international relations and film, focusing on 25 years of cinematic representation of politics in the region (1980-2005), from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Gulf War to Islamic fundamentalism, and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (IB Tauris 2008). The book takes a socio-political approach to the study of Lebanese cinema over the last thirty years, focusing on the issues of Lebanese national identity, history, sectarian conflict, and memory of the Civil War.

Lina has recently finished writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle for IB Tauris. The book examines the power struggles among states, other political actors, and citizens in the region that are expressed through visuals, and focuses on case studies from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran, with a focus on the role of the image as a political tool in the Arab Spring. She has also recently led a multidisciplinary research project on US public diplomacy in the digital age, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Wolverhampton, the outcome of which will appear in the Middle East Journal in 2012.

Before joining the academic field, Lina worked in broadcast journalism in Lebanon. She is a frequent commentator on the Middle East in the media with appearances on Al-Jazeera (Arabic and English), CNN, BBC, Sky News and other media outlets across the globe.