Sherine Hamdy
Biographic Data
| ID | 84061 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sherine Hamdy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamdy |
| SIGNATURE | HAMDY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0387-2336 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Anthropology, Comics, and Graphic Narratives
In the past decade, anthropologists have taken up drawing—more specifically, comics and graphic narratives—as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a pedagogical tool, and a medium through which to share anthropological ideas. This review examines the graphic turn in anthropology. As part of a wider turn to multimodal and nontraditional modes of research and scholarship, anthropologists are both using drawing practices in their field research an…
Drawing Dissent from the Assad Regime to Beirut Uprisings
This article describes Syrian artist Lina Ghaibeh’s role in establishing the field of Arab comics as a pioneer in Arabic graphic narrative and animation, as an archivist of Arab comics through her role as the founding director of the Arab Comics Center in Beirut, as a creator of personal graphic narratives, and as teacher to generations of university students. The article delves more deeply into her work in the last two capacities: as a producer …
Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg
The articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diver…
Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt
This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative c…
The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation
Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. …
Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt
Comics and revolution as global public health intervention: The Case of Lissa
In this article, we discuss the inextricable entanglement of public health and political revolution, and why comics is a particularly amenable medium to explore how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. We discuss our process in creating a sequential comic narrative, Lissa, that portrays a working-class Egyptian family, informed by hundreds of interviews an…
Lissa: Introduction to the Excerpt
Gendering the Gift of Life: Family Politics and Kidney Donation in Egypt and Mexico
In this article, we demonstrate how living kidney donation is a particularly gendered experience. We draw on anthropologists' contributions to understanding the globalization of reproductive technologies to argue that kidney donation similarly endangers and preserves fertility, thereby unsettling and reifying gendered familial labor. Based on fieldwork in two ethnographic sites--Egypt and Mexico--we examine how kidney donation is figured as a for…
All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo's Political Unrest
Using dead bodies for medical purposes has long been considered taboo in Egypt. Public health campaigns, physicians' pleas, and the urgings of religious scholars all failed to alter public opinion regarding the donation of dead bodies either for instructional material or for therapeutic treatments. Yet in 2011, amid revolutionary turmoil in Egypt, a campaign was launched for people to donate their eyes upon death; this time, people readily signed…
Egypt’s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality
Political Challenges to Biomedical Universalism: Kidney Failure among Egypt's Poor
Why do patients in need of kidney transplants in Egypt decline offers of kidney donation from their family members out of reluctance to cause them harm? Is it not universally the case that a living donor could live in complete health with a single remaining kidney? To address this conundrum, I discuss a case study from Egypt, in which patients reveal social, political, and environmental stresses on organ function that challenge the presumed unive…
Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt
Why has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three decades? This book analyzes the national debate over organ transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation—including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamic …
Strength and vulnerability after Egypt's Arab Spring uprisings
Following the revolts that unseated Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, a contradictory discourse has emerged in which Egyptians imagine themselves to be resilient in body and spirit but also enfeebled by years of political corruption and state negligence. During the mass protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the regime's orchestrated violence neither crushed the movement nor provoked activists to abandon their vow of peaceful protest. However, Egyptian…
The Organ Transplant Debate in Egypt: A Social Anthropological Analysis
In this paper, I take the heated debate about the ethics of organ transplantation in Egypt, to ask why Egypt is the only Muslim country in the world that has, for the past three decades, been unable to pass legislation for a national organ transplant program. Why is it that patients and even physicians articulate their antipathy to organ transplantation in terms of “Islam” when most Muslim scholars of Islamic law have argued that the donation of …
Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention: Lessons from Egypt on the Cultivation of Forbearance ( Sabr ) and Reliance on God ( Tawakkul)
One of the most fundamental ways that religious devotion is held to be "antibiotechnology" is in its emphasis on submission to divine will. This article seeks to re-orient discussions of religious "fatalism" through ethnographic analysis of terminally-ill dialysis patients in Egypt who argue that they would rather "accept God's will" than pursue kidney transplantation. I argue against the presumptions that this is a religious constraint on a pote…
When the state and your kidneys fail: Political etiologies in an Egyptian dialysis ward
In this article, I describe how poor Egyptian kidney-disease patients understand and experience their illness in terms of Egypt's larger social, economic, and political ills. The suffering that patients in end-stage renal failure endure, as they articulate it, extends beyond the pathological kidney and implicates corrupt institutions, polluted water, the mismanagement of toxic waste, and unsafe food. End-stage kidney failure patients in Egypt dep…
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood
When the state and your kidneys fail: Political etiologies in an Egyptian dialysis ward
In this article, I describe how poor Egyptian kidney-disease patients understand and experience their illness in terms of Egypt's larger social, economic, and political ills. The suffering that patients in end-stage renal failure endure, as they articulate it, extends beyond the pathological kidney and implicates corrupt institutions, polluted water, the mismanagement of toxic waste, and unsafe food. End-stage kidney failure patients in Egypt dep…
Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention: Lessons from Egypt on the Cultivation of Forbearance ( Sabr ) and Reliance on God ( Tawakkul)
One of the most fundamental ways that religious devotion is held to be "antibiotechnology" is in its emphasis on submission to divine will. This article seeks to re-orient discussions of religious "fatalism" through ethnographic analysis of terminally-ill dialysis patients in Egypt who argue that they would rather "accept God's will" than pursue kidney transplantation. I argue against the presumptions that this is a religious constraint on a pote…
Strength and vulnerability after Egypt's Arab Spring uprisings
Following the revolts that unseated Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, a contradictory discourse has emerged in which Egyptians imagine themselves to be resilient in body and spirit but also enfeebled by years of political corruption and state negligence. During the mass protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the regime's orchestrated violence neither crushed the movement nor provoked activists to abandon their vow of peaceful protest. However, Egyptian…
Political Challenges to Biomedical Universalism: Kidney Failure among Egypt's Poor
Why do patients in need of kidney transplants in Egypt decline offers of kidney donation from their family members out of reluctance to cause them harm? Is it not universally the case that a living donor could live in complete health with a single remaining kidney? To address this conundrum, I discuss a case study from Egypt, in which patients reveal social, political, and environmental stresses on organ function that challenge the presumed unive…
Gendering the Gift of Life: Family Politics and Kidney Donation in Egypt and Mexico
In this article, we demonstrate how living kidney donation is a particularly gendered experience. We draw on anthropologists' contributions to understanding the globalization of reproductive technologies to argue that kidney donation similarly endangers and preserves fertility, thereby unsettling and reifying gendered familial labor. Based on fieldwork in two ethnographic sites--Egypt and Mexico--we examine how kidney donation is figured as a for…
Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt
All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo's Political Unrest
Using dead bodies for medical purposes has long been considered taboo in Egypt. Public health campaigns, physicians' pleas, and the urgings of religious scholars all failed to alter public opinion regarding the donation of dead bodies either for instructional material or for therapeutic treatments. Yet in 2011, amid revolutionary turmoil in Egypt, a campaign was launched for people to donate their eyes upon death; this time, people readily signed…
Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt
This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative c…
The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation
Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. …
Lissa: Introduction to the Excerpt
When the state and your kidneys fail: Political etiologies in an Egyptian dialysis ward
In this article, I describe how poor Egyptian kidney-disease patients understand and experience their illness in terms of Egypt's larger social, economic, and political ills. The suffering that patients in end-stage renal failure endure, as they articulate it, extends beyond the pathological kidney and implicates corrupt institutions, polluted water, the mismanagement of toxic waste, and unsafe food. End-stage kidney failure patients in Egypt dep…
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood
Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention: Lessons from Egypt on the Cultivation of Forbearance ( Sabr ) and Reliance on God ( Tawakkul)
One of the most fundamental ways that religious devotion is held to be "antibiotechnology" is in its emphasis on submission to divine will. This article seeks to re-orient discussions of religious "fatalism" through ethnographic analysis of terminally-ill dialysis patients in Egypt who argue that they would rather "accept God's will" than pursue kidney transplantation. I argue against the presumptions that this is a religious constraint on a pote…
The Organ Transplant Debate in Egypt: A Social Anthropological Analysis
In this paper, I take the heated debate about the ethics of organ transplantation in Egypt, to ask why Egypt is the only Muslim country in the world that has, for the past three decades, been unable to pass legislation for a national organ transplant program. Why is it that patients and even physicians articulate their antipathy to organ transplantation in terms of “Islam” when most Muslim scholars of Islamic law have argued that the donation of …
Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt
Why has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three decades? This book analyzes the national debate over organ transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation—including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamic …
Strength and vulnerability after Egypt's Arab Spring uprisings
Following the revolts that unseated Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, a contradictory discourse has emerged in which Egyptians imagine themselves to be resilient in body and spirit but also enfeebled by years of political corruption and state negligence. During the mass protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the regime's orchestrated violence neither crushed the movement nor provoked activists to abandon their vow of peaceful protest. However, Egyptian…
Political Challenges to Biomedical Universalism: Kidney Failure among Egypt's Poor
Why do patients in need of kidney transplants in Egypt decline offers of kidney donation from their family members out of reluctance to cause them harm? Is it not universally the case that a living donor could live in complete health with a single remaining kidney? To address this conundrum, I discuss a case study from Egypt, in which patients reveal social, political, and environmental stresses on organ function that challenge the presumed unive…
Egypt’s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality
Gendering the Gift of Life: Family Politics and Kidney Donation in Egypt and Mexico
In this article, we demonstrate how living kidney donation is a particularly gendered experience. We draw on anthropologists' contributions to understanding the globalization of reproductive technologies to argue that kidney donation similarly endangers and preserves fertility, thereby unsettling and reifying gendered familial labor. Based on fieldwork in two ethnographic sites--Egypt and Mexico--we examine how kidney donation is figured as a for…
All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo's Political Unrest
Using dead bodies for medical purposes has long been considered taboo in Egypt. Public health campaigns, physicians' pleas, and the urgings of religious scholars all failed to alter public opinion regarding the donation of dead bodies either for instructional material or for therapeutic treatments. Yet in 2011, amid revolutionary turmoil in Egypt, a campaign was launched for people to donate their eyes upon death; this time, people readily signed…
Lissa: Introduction to the Excerpt
Comics and revolution as global public health intervention: The Case of Lissa
In this article, we discuss the inextricable entanglement of public health and political revolution, and why comics is a particularly amenable medium to explore how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. We discuss our process in creating a sequential comic narrative, Lissa, that portrays a working-class Egyptian family, informed by hundreds of interviews an…
Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt
The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation
Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. …
Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg
The articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diver…
Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt
This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative c…
Anthropology, Comics, and Graphic Narratives
In the past decade, anthropologists have taken up drawing—more specifically, comics and graphic narratives—as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a pedagogical tool, and a medium through which to share anthropological ideas. This review examines the graphic turn in anthropology. As part of a wider turn to multimodal and nontraditional modes of research and scholarship, anthropologists are both using drawing practices in their field research an…
Drawing Dissent from the Assad Regime to Beirut Uprisings
This article describes Syrian artist Lina Ghaibeh’s role in establishing the field of Arab comics as a pioneer in Arabic graphic narrative and animation, as an archivist of Arab comics through her role as the founding director of the Arab Comics Center in Beirut, as a creator of personal graphic narratives, and as teacher to generations of university students. The article delves more deeply into her work in the last two capacities: as a producer …
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Medicine (7 works) · History (6 works) · Comics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Organ Donation and Transplantation (5 works)