Aya Nassar
Biographic Data
| ID | 659917 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aya Nassar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aya |
| FAMILY NAME | Nassar |
| SIGNATURE | NASSAR A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9801-1503 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Egypt's geographical tradition: The post‐independence moment and shifting regional imaginations
The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non‐west. This ‘non‐west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this rei…
Giving up the Idea of Home: Ambivalent Geographies, Geopoetics, and Resisting Capture in the Cities of the Middle East
This paper sits with the geopoetics of the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal to grapple with affective ambivalence towards common objects of desire, such as an anchorage of one's place in the world, an idea of home. What does it mean to “train” ourselves into the idea that we are never really at home? In what forms might these trainings to come to terms with our precarious relation to the world manifest? And how might they rework imaginations …
An open letter to the SJTG and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG ): The War on Gaza, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG ), and a Palestinian literary event
Mindful that the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) has previously declared that ‘the SJTG hopes to publish more scholarship on the past, present and future geographies of decolonization and the decolonization of geography. We encourage submissions...that advance these agendas.’ (Sidaway et al., 2021: 6) we hope that the SJTG will publish this open letter, as a public and permanent record. During the first week of Israel's war on Gaza…
To be called forth by a speck of dust
Less a response, this commentary is a conversation with Anna Secor's ‘Spacetimeunconscious’, riffing off its offering. I trace one of the playful characters in Secor's article, the speck of dust that shapeshifts across the paper's 18 pages, folding and dispersing geographies and temporalities. I am wrestling with how to make sense of geographies that I care about, exactly at the same moment when these geographies are blown up into shards all over…
Decentring whiteness in engaging Muslim geographies
In this commentary, I read Sidaway's ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’ as an invitation to engage in alternative cartographies and lateral engagements with what Islam (broadly and complexly conceived) might say to the discipline. In doing so, I build upon Sidaway's invitation to suggest a deeper engagement with the complexity of already existing Islamic geographical traditions and scholarship on Muslim spatialities by pulling o…
Objects, memories, and storytelling: Experiments in narrating ideas of home
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
Kites, billboards and bridges: Reading the city's curfew through the glitch
This article is an attempt at reading the city through what gets extended and/or suspended in it in a time of an interruption, or a glitch. It does this while thinking about Cairo's curfew during the summer of 2020. I focus on this short pause that disrupted what is perceived to be regular urban life in a place like Cairo. Centering a collaboration with the Egyptian visual artist Azza Ezzat, we read some snapshots of this seemingly minor interrup…
Fragment(s) of Memor(ies): The Enduring Question of Space and Storytelling
For decades, the twin issues of remembering and memorialising space on one hand, and forgetting and neglecting on the other hand, have been intertwined with attempts at carving spaces for memory. While many initiatives and actions have grappled with these questions, this special issue asks: What animates these endeavours? What does the act of remembering promise? How does forgetting operate as an ever-present looming threat? How are the stories o…
Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery
In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not on…
Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo
In this paper, I perform an approach for a material and affective geography of the postcolonial city that is developed from within the spaces of Cairo and its archives. I propose storytelling the city through its geopoetics, where geopoetics emphasizes the elemental materiality of space. Taking inspiration from Angela Last, the geopoetics in this essay denotes disruptive aesthetics: intersection between word, aesthetics, and the geophysical mater…
To Stand by the Ruins of a Revolutionary City
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Endurance in the city victorious
Staging the State: Commemoration, Urban Space and the National Symbolic Order in 1970s Cairo
This article investigates how commemorating practices are deployed to fix and affirm sovereignty and its ordering. Through conceptualizing commemorating practices as ‘national symbolic order’, this article focuses on Cairo’s monument of the Unknown Soldier as a tangled cluster of shifting attempts to signify urban space. Built shortly after the 1973 war, the monument expressed an approach to nationalist symbolism that was in line with how the Sad…
Dust: Perfect Circularity
This essay centres on a recent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery, London - A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany. The exhibition focuses on the thing/concept/idea of dust and features the work and thoughts of artists (e.g. Duchamp), photographers (e.g. Man Ray) and others. In this essay, we walk through the exhibition, pausing at some of its displays while contextualising a number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. Dust,…
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberlism's Stealth Revolution \ Wendy Brown
Where the dust settles: Fieldwork, subjectivity and materiality in Cairo
This article uses the very materiality of the city, namely its dust, to reflect on the processes of researching and writing about it. By using ‘dust’ as both a material and an imaginative metaphor that assembles architecture, urban space, archives and history, I argue that field environments, in a very material sense, seep through our fieldwork methodologies. Written through a series of four vignettes; this article reflects on conducting archival…
Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery
In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not on…
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo
In this paper, I perform an approach for a material and affective geography of the postcolonial city that is developed from within the spaces of Cairo and its archives. I propose storytelling the city through its geopoetics, where geopoetics emphasizes the elemental materiality of space. Taking inspiration from Angela Last, the geopoetics in this essay denotes disruptive aesthetics: intersection between word, aesthetics, and the geophysical mater…
Dust: Perfect Circularity
This essay centres on a recent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery, London - A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany. The exhibition focuses on the thing/concept/idea of dust and features the work and thoughts of artists (e.g. Duchamp), photographers (e.g. Man Ray) and others. In this essay, we walk through the exhibition, pausing at some of its displays while contextualising a number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. Dust,…
Where the dust settles: Fieldwork, subjectivity and materiality in Cairo
This article uses the very materiality of the city, namely its dust, to reflect on the processes of researching and writing about it. By using ‘dust’ as both a material and an imaginative metaphor that assembles architecture, urban space, archives and history, I argue that field environments, in a very material sense, seep through our fieldwork methodologies. Written through a series of four vignettes; this article reflects on conducting archival…
Kites, billboards and bridges: Reading the city's curfew through the glitch
This article is an attempt at reading the city through what gets extended and/or suspended in it in a time of an interruption, or a glitch. It does this while thinking about Cairo's curfew during the summer of 2020. I focus on this short pause that disrupted what is perceived to be regular urban life in a place like Cairo. Centering a collaboration with the Egyptian visual artist Azza Ezzat, we read some snapshots of this seemingly minor interrup…
Objects, memories, and storytelling: Experiments in narrating ideas of home
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
To Stand by the Ruins of a Revolutionary City
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Egypt's geographical tradition: The post‐independence moment and shifting regional imaginations
The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non‐west. This ‘non‐west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this rei…
Giving up the Idea of Home: Ambivalent Geographies, Geopoetics, and Resisting Capture in the Cities of the Middle East
This paper sits with the geopoetics of the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal to grapple with affective ambivalence towards common objects of desire, such as an anchorage of one's place in the world, an idea of home. What does it mean to “train” ourselves into the idea that we are never really at home? In what forms might these trainings to come to terms with our precarious relation to the world manifest? And how might they rework imaginations …
Decentring whiteness in engaging Muslim geographies
In this commentary, I read Sidaway's ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’ as an invitation to engage in alternative cartographies and lateral engagements with what Islam (broadly and complexly conceived) might say to the discipline. In doing so, I build upon Sidaway's invitation to suggest a deeper engagement with the complexity of already existing Islamic geographical traditions and scholarship on Muslim spatialities by pulling o…
Staging the State: Commemoration, Urban Space and the National Symbolic Order in 1970s Cairo
This article investigates how commemorating practices are deployed to fix and affirm sovereignty and its ordering. Through conceptualizing commemorating practices as ‘national symbolic order’, this article focuses on Cairo’s monument of the Unknown Soldier as a tangled cluster of shifting attempts to signify urban space. Built shortly after the 1973 war, the monument expressed an approach to nationalist symbolism that was in line with how the Sad…
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberlism's Stealth Revolution \ Wendy Brown
Where the dust settles: Fieldwork, subjectivity and materiality in Cairo
This article uses the very materiality of the city, namely its dust, to reflect on the processes of researching and writing about it. By using ‘dust’ as both a material and an imaginative metaphor that assembles architecture, urban space, archives and history, I argue that field environments, in a very material sense, seep through our fieldwork methodologies. Written through a series of four vignettes; this article reflects on conducting archival…
Dust: Perfect Circularity
This essay centres on a recent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery, London - A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany. The exhibition focuses on the thing/concept/idea of dust and features the work and thoughts of artists (e.g. Duchamp), photographers (e.g. Man Ray) and others. In this essay, we walk through the exhibition, pausing at some of its displays while contextualising a number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. Dust,…
Endurance in the city victorious
Staging the State: Commemoration, Urban Space and the National Symbolic Order in 1970s Cairo
This article investigates how commemorating practices are deployed to fix and affirm sovereignty and its ordering. Through conceptualizing commemorating practices as ‘national symbolic order’, this article focuses on Cairo’s monument of the Unknown Soldier as a tangled cluster of shifting attempts to signify urban space. Built shortly after the 1973 war, the monument expressed an approach to nationalist symbolism that was in line with how the Sad…
To Stand by the Ruins of a Revolutionary City
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Fragment(s) of Memor(ies): The Enduring Question of Space and Storytelling
For decades, the twin issues of remembering and memorialising space on one hand, and forgetting and neglecting on the other hand, have been intertwined with attempts at carving spaces for memory. While many initiatives and actions have grappled with these questions, this special issue asks: What animates these endeavours? What does the act of remembering promise? How does forgetting operate as an ever-present looming threat? How are the stories o…
Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery
In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not on…
Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo
In this paper, I perform an approach for a material and affective geography of the postcolonial city that is developed from within the spaces of Cairo and its archives. I propose storytelling the city through its geopoetics, where geopoetics emphasizes the elemental materiality of space. Taking inspiration from Angela Last, the geopoetics in this essay denotes disruptive aesthetics: intersection between word, aesthetics, and the geophysical mater…
Decentring whiteness in engaging Muslim geographies
In this commentary, I read Sidaway's ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’ as an invitation to engage in alternative cartographies and lateral engagements with what Islam (broadly and complexly conceived) might say to the discipline. In doing so, I build upon Sidaway's invitation to suggest a deeper engagement with the complexity of already existing Islamic geographical traditions and scholarship on Muslim spatialities by pulling o…
Objects, memories, and storytelling: Experiments in narrating ideas of home
How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/ possible futures? How do they undo our 'ideas of home'? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so …
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
Kites, billboards and bridges: Reading the city's curfew through the glitch
This article is an attempt at reading the city through what gets extended and/or suspended in it in a time of an interruption, or a glitch. It does this while thinking about Cairo's curfew during the summer of 2020. I focus on this short pause that disrupted what is perceived to be regular urban life in a place like Cairo. Centering a collaboration with the Egyptian visual artist Azza Ezzat, we read some snapshots of this seemingly minor interrup…
An open letter to the SJTG and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG ): The War on Gaza, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG ), and a Palestinian literary event
Mindful that the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) has previously declared that ‘the SJTG hopes to publish more scholarship on the past, present and future geographies of decolonization and the decolonization of geography. We encourage submissions...that advance these agendas.’ (Sidaway et al., 2021: 6) we hope that the SJTG will publish this open letter, as a public and permanent record. During the first week of Israel's war on Gaza…
To be called forth by a speck of dust
Less a response, this commentary is a conversation with Anna Secor's ‘Spacetimeunconscious’, riffing off its offering. I trace one of the playful characters in Secor's article, the speck of dust that shapeshifts across the paper's 18 pages, folding and dispersing geographies and temporalities. I am wrestling with how to make sense of geographies that I care about, exactly at the same moment when these geographies are blown up into shards all over…
Egypt's geographical tradition: The post‐independence moment and shifting regional imaginations
The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non‐west. This ‘non‐west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this rei…
Giving up the Idea of Home: Ambivalent Geographies, Geopoetics, and Resisting Capture in the Cities of the Middle East
This paper sits with the geopoetics of the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal to grapple with affective ambivalence towards common objects of desire, such as an anchorage of one's place in the world, an idea of home. What does it mean to “train” ourselves into the idea that we are never really at home? In what forms might these trainings to come to terms with our precarious relation to the world manifest? And how might they rework imaginations …
Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · History (5 works) · History (5 works) · Narrative (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works)