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Alia Mossallam
by
Lina Attallah
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Alia Mosallam is a thinker, often weaving her thoughts in writings that range from letters to graduates theses, but also in different other acts of organizing, advocacy and mobilization. Her main academic inquiry has been centered on how history, especially of resistance, can be re-imagined and re-written through the ranks of the verbal, the sung and more broadly, the popular, the vernacular. Her PhD thesis covered the period between 1956 and 1974, which marked formative post-colonial struggles and their most contemporary embodiment in the Arab-Israeli wars. But her PhD thesis was only one form of mediation for her key epistemological inquiry, which she took to different spaces of production: artistic, pedagogical and more. She conceptualized and led workshops with young writers and historians on unearthing untold histories of an anarchist and socialist Alexandria in the north of Egypt and a resistant Nubia and Port Said, south and east of the mainland. She provided the research backbone for theatrical productions on key moments of dissent in Egypt, namely 1919 and 2011. She wrote for influential local and international publications on revolution, imprisonment and resistance, where argumentative rigor met poetics to create powerful and engaging texts. She brought all these processes, of thinking and producing, to classrooms, both in formal institutions she taught at like the American University in Cairo and alternative ones like the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts. While unearthing alternative histories and understanding resistance and dissent have been her main intellectual preoccupations, Alia has been invested in different educational back ends that can make these inquiries possible. She was a curriculum developer for an annual creative Arab youth camp organized by the Arab Digital Expression Foundation and was a child protection officer with UNICEF. Her thinking, writing, conceptualizing, teaching, mentoring and facilitating have been paralleled with other acts of engagement with the surrounding socio-political environment, particularly in times of revolution: from marching in squares of dissent, to participating in campaigns around the popular writing of the Constitution, to contributing to advocacies for minors in military prisons. She is a wife and mother of two: Taya (the rock?) and Rawi (the storyteller). To her family, she brings all of the above, and through motherhood, she is learning new things about presence, resistance and telling stories about them.

Alia Cairo 1
Alia Mossallam at the 60pages Cairo Workshop
Alia Cairo 2
Alia Mossallam at the 60pages Cairo Workshop

Rawi

12.06.17
180 min
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Rawi

12.06.17
180 min
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Alia Mossallam