MAPPING EMERGING GENDER ARTIVISM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ARAB PUBLIC SPACE

Introduction

MEGAMAPS aims to produce a transnational in-depth study on Artivism for gender equality in the Mediterranean Arab public space after the 2011 uprisings. This will be achieved by using an interdisciplinary novel methodology, where History and Social Movements Theory intersect with Gender Studies, Visual Arts, and Digital Humanities.

Project Focus

By focusing on four countries (Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia), the project aims to innovate the global academic knowledge on the Arab region. It seeks to write an unprecedented history from below that investigates the interplay between gender, public aesthetic dissent, and social change.

Methodology

Based on fieldwork and digital ethnography, MEGAMAPS aims to:

1. Frame emerging Artivism for gender equality.
2. Explore Artivism as a political incubator that revitalizes an egalitarian project of society in the post-2011 authoritarian ebb.

Digital Platform

In addition to academic publications, the project aims to produce the first open access and participative digital platform. This platform will consistently document, systematize, and interconnect a corpus of living sources, including:

• Visual and performative arts
• Oral interviews
• Cartographies, maps, and graphic tools

The platform will:

a) Innovate the traditional approaches of History and Social Movements Theory on the Arab region.
b) Provide the first research platform dealing with Artivism, gender, and social change in the Arab region.
c) Make this corpus FAIRly accessible to academics, stakeholders, and the general public.

Dissemination Activities

MEGAMAPS also involves a set of dissemination activities aimed at improving activists’ participation in a transnational network of artists, researchers, policy-makers, and civil society stakeholders. The goals of these activities include:

• Promoting mutual exchanges of best practices in the field of gender equality, arts, and democratic governance.
• Contributing to reversing the victimization paradigm on women and sexual minorities in the Arab region by proposing an agency paradigm.
• Overcoming orientalism and Islamophobia within the Western public opinion.