How do we come to know our identities? What does it mean to be Egyptian, Arab, or other in diaspora? How do exiles come to define their relationship with ‘home’? What is Alexandria as metaphor? How do we move forward to rebuild this city of memory? These are a few of the thought-provoking questions that Amro Ali explores in this conversation about growing up in Australia and retuning to Alexandria.
Dr. Amro Ali is a lecturer in political sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC), a research fellow at the Forum transregionale Studien (EUME) in Berlin, and a member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Previously, he was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at AUC, an associate of the Sydney Democracy Network, and a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Berlin Social Science Center, WZB). And Amro Ali was once a stand-up comic!? Check out one of his acts here (after listening to our conversation, of course).
This is the third in a series of interviews with artists, academics, activists, and other migrants of Egypt around the world. Check out previous conversations in the series and stay tuned for our next installment, a discussion with chef Shahir Massoud on his book: Eat, Habibi, Eat!
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Any chance there is a transcript available? I listened to this, but the sound quality was such that I missed a lot. I’d really love to read it through.
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