Exile: a polyvalent term

An online lecture by ElSayed Mahmoud ElSehamy, PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England. The lecture is no. 9/9 in the fall 2021 online lecture series.

Studies on exile are broad and multi-disciplinary. Exile is an epistemic construct among other key figures of migration, such as refugees, travellers, and/or economic, irregular, or forced migrants. These figures are scholarly and bureaucratic categorizations and representations of different understandings of people’s mobility across international borders regimes. In this seminar, I will present multi-disciplinary understandings of exile and how the term has been employed by many scholars referring to different, sometimes contradictory, case studies. Accordingly, I show what could be gained from this multi-disciplinary literature in my ethnographic research with post-2013 Egyptian exiles in Europe and Turkey. My aim is to show what the term can do in understanding unfolding political exclusion, displacement and diasporic lives, not what exile is per se.

About

ElSayed Mahmoud ElSehamy is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His doctoral dissertation, titled “The exiled revolution and the revolutionary exile: emergent subjectivities of Egyptian political exiles in Istanbul,” examines Egyptian exiles’ political trajectories after displacement in the aftermath of the 2013 military coup in Egypt. He holds an MA degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. ElSayed has been a fellow researcher (2019-2020) at The Aleppo Project, School of Public Policy at CEU. His research interests include exile, state configurations, violence, subjectivity, and knowledge production in the Arab world.

Participate in the online event


Lecture Series

The research project Mediatized Diaspora – Contentious Politics among Arab Media Users in Europe at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, invites you to the fall 2021 online lecture series on Middle Eastern media, diaspora and politics Post-Arab Spring.

All lectures will take place on Thursdays at 17:15 (CET).

For any inquiries, please contact project leader: Dr Ehab Galal