State futurism (what the catalog sometimes calls “corporate” or “anticipatory” futurism) is the top-down version: national Vision plans (Saudi 2030, Qatar National Vision 2030, UAE Centennial 2071, Oman 2040, Kuwait 2035) that market the Gulf’s future as glass towers, AI cities, and seamless modernity, arriving pre-solved and depoliticized. It treats the future as a branding…
This chapter surveys the state of digital humanities across the Arab world, arguing that despite an explosion of digital and social media data since the 2011 uprisings, humanities scholarship in Arabic/Middle East studies has been slow to engage critically with digital content and tools. It traces a wide range of practices, including archival digitization projects…
Laila : As introduction, I am a person in real life. I have had many radical and different experiences that I slip in and out of quite naturally. Hyperconscious of this fluidity, ten year ago I created a moniker for my cyborg self as a conceptual art project. VJ Um Amel is an Arabic-speaking cyborg I perform online, on screens and…
Rather than attempting the impossible task of understanding the totality of what Arabic speakers are producing online—this archival process collects modest percentages of data and from within defines scopes of analysis. In other terms, then, discontinuity is a bifurcation, a switch from one virtual pattern to another. Critical research and artistic practices are all tied…