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Dr. Carrie Wickham Will Be Visiting the UA Political Science Department

February 27, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Dr. Carrie Wickham will be visiting the University of Alabama Political Science Department on Wednesday, February 27th to give a talk in ten Hoor 117 from 12:00-1:30 pm.

Talk title: “Rethinking the Origins of Civic Culture and Why It Matters for the Study of the Arab World

Abstract: Developments in the wake of the Arab Uprisings underscore that authoritarian legacies are difficult to unravel.  With the exception of Tunisia, democratization in the region has stalled. Yet portrait risks flattening out a more complex reality.  Instead, we should think of democratization as a multivalent process extending beyond the domain of formal politics to encompass changes at the level of society, culture and the individual psyche. In particular, there are numerous instances of social experimentation in which a diverse mix of state and non-state actors are working to strengthen “civic” or “humanist” norms and values under existing institutional constraints. Arab citizens engaged in the “art of the possible” are quietly transforming public habits of mind and behavior and sowing the seeds for wider culture-shifts in society at large. In so doing, they demonstrate that hope and resilience can alter the region’s future.

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Emory University.  She studies social movements and contentious politics with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa.  She is the author of Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2002); The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton University Press, 2013, 2015).

 

This event in the Spring 2019 Middle East Studies Speakers Series is organized by the Program for Middle East Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science.

Details

Date:
February 27, 2019
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm