invites you to a luncheon briefing: 

“Politics of Informality: On the Power of the Public Spheres of Egypt”

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 featuring:

 Heba Raouf
Associate Professor 
Cairo University

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While politics has long been studied from a modernist systemic approach, sociology has been trying to relate the form to relations of power, and ideologies have addressed power and thought as being in a dialectical multi-dimensional relation. Yet even the shift from old to new social movements did not grasp the emergence of a new rationale of political agency. Informality is a concept that needs to be introduced here to allow better understanding of the political in its different manifestations and transformations. The Egyptian revolution can be approached through the lenses of informality, how the old social movements paved the way to new ones, and how the moment of change crystalised through in-formal actions.

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Heba Raouf Ezzat holds a Ph.D in political theory and has been teaching at Cairo University since 1987, and is also an affiliate professor the American University in Cairo (since 2006). She currently serves as Visiting Senior Fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Her research, publications and activism is focused on comparative political theory, women in Islam, global civil society, new social movements and sociology of the virtual space. She is also a cofounder of Islamonline.net which is now Onislam.net, an academic advisor of many youth civil initiatives, the member of the Board of Trustees of Alexandria Trust for Education - London, and the Head of the Board of Trustees of the Republican Consent Foundation – Cairo. She was a research fellow at the University of Westminster (UK) (1995-1996), the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (1998 and 2012), and the Center for Middle East Studies, University of California-Berkeley (2010). She recently participated in establishing the House of Wisdom, the first independent Egyptian Think Tank founded after the Egyptian revolution 2011.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

12:30pm - ICC 270

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Seating is limited.

Lunch will be served.

For directions to the Center and information on parking, please visit: http://acmcu.georgetown.edu/about/contact/