The Peace and Conflict Studies Department is pleased to be a co-sponsor of this talk, featuring Dr. Maria Frederika Malmström, taking place at Swarthmore College.

Title: The Living Dead or the Sonic Story of Male Bodies Behind Bars in Egypt
Speaker: Dr. Maria Frederika Malmström, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Research Fellow; The Aga Khan University, London
Date & Time : April 19th, Wednesday, 4:30 pm
Location: Kohlberg Hall 228

This talk tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.

Sponsored by: Sociology & Anthropology, Arabic section of MLL, Islamic Studies, Peace & Conflict Studies