Description:

Please join us for the Global Lunchbox series, a weekly conversational forum hosted by the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies featuring work-in-progress by members of the Northwestern community.

Making noise has long been a tactic of disruption used by activists at protests worldwide. But how does politicized noise mobilize solidarity across and over digital platforms? Looking at the Arab revolutions (Egypt and Syria), Shayna Silverstein will examine the role of audio and audibility in digital networked media with attention to how audibility forges political synergy between live and online funeral protests.

Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor of Performance Studies and a core faculty member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern. Her research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East, with a focus on Syria. Her current book project analyzes the ethos of movement (ḥarake in Syrian Arabic) and performance in authoritarian and repressive regimes, specifically how Syrian dabke, a popular dance music suffused with cultural memory and nationhood, has paradoxically contributed to the isolation and fragmentation of Syria at the moment of its undoing.

Her recent and forthcoming publications include essays in the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Performance Matters, Music & Politics, Remapping Sound Studies (Duke University Press), Punk Ethnography (Wesleyan University Press), Islam and Popular Culture (University of Texas Press), and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, among others. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

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https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92681922894

Meeting ID:
926 8192 2894

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