What happens when official archives are inaccessible, or when they are lost during conflict? What happens when what remains for survivors of wars and dictatorships is not an institutional record, but a family album, a memory of a television series, or a fragment of an everyday object?
This talk is an invitation to think about the entanglement of archival and ethnographic methods that emerge from particular political conditions and historical events in the Middle East. These methods do not merely expose the power relations embedded in the making of colonial and postcolonial archives. They draw attention to community-driven, diasporic forms of memory work that should not only be framed as alternatives to official archives, or simply as critiques of them. Rather, they create innovative ways of relating to the past, and other possibilities for narrating lives shaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarian rule.
Accordingly, Dr. Mina Ibrahim will discuss examples of digital and on-site, bottom-up archival projects that he has learned from, worked with, and established. These projects demonstrate that archives should be analyzed as unfinished stories, specifically because their approaches are based on linking a pool of existing collections, oral histories, ethnographic encounters, and other grounded practices of preservation. Dr. Mina Ibrahim will argue that such efforts do not only fill the gaps left by absent official archives, but they also make visible new forms of scholarly inquiry that emerge through the act of building, curating, and interpreting archives with and for communities.
Dr. Mina Ibrahim is an anthropologist and community archivist from Cairo, Egypt, and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany (within the Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies (MeDiMi) research group). He is also the founding director of Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s first neighborhood community archive, and serves as the coordinator of the interdisciplinary regional initiative the MENA Prison Forum. His work together with his recent and forthcoming publications ask how archives are made, withheld, and fought over, and what it means to build memory and justice “from below” in contexts shaped by violence, displacement, and uneven access to official records. In 2022, Mina Ibrahim completed a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of Gießen. His dissertation, published as Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt (Palgrave, 2022/2023), traces Coptic lives unfolding in “misfit” or negated spaces (including prisons, bars, coffeehouses and other marginalized social worlds) and examines how visibility, silence, and respectability politics shape what can be said and remembered.
