Power and Strategies of Social and Political Order

Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė is a post-doctoral fellow in the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences. She received a doctoral degree in sociology from EHESS (Paris) for her dissertation on the Egyptian Islamist intellectual’s Sayyid Qutb’s intellectual networks. During the Egyptian revolution, she was a doctoral fellow in CEDEJ, in Cairo, where she closely followed multiple stages of the uprising. As her postdoctoral project, she is focusing on Egypt’s cultural field through the micro-sociological exploration of the sociable dimension of literary writing practiced in literary symposiums (nadawat).  Departing from this site of observation, she explores various dimensions of Egypt’s post-revolutionary cultural politics informed by crumbling State cultural institutions, political divisions and the sweeping numbers of aspiring writers due to the alternative media channels of becoming a writer. She contributes to the Power project with a research on the way literary sociabilities observable in literary symposiums affect the distribution of symbolic capital within Egypt’s literary field.

Publications related to the Power Project

“Connecting Scales of Change: Public Writings, Shilla and Generation. The Case of Sayyid Qutb’s radicalization in 1940s Egypt,” Snapshots of Change. Methodological Approaches in Studying Social Transformations(eds Yasmine Berriane, Annuska Derks, Aymon Kreil, Dorothea Lüddeckens), Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 (forthcoming).

“Intellectuals and the People. Portrayals of the Rebel in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising“, Middle East Topics and Arguments, 2016, vol. 6

Academic Talks

September 2016 – “Culture as Politics. Competing Readings of Islamic Literary Activism in Contemporary Egypt”, Summer Academy “Reconfiguring the (Non-Political). Performing and Narrating Change and Continuity“, Tunis. December 2016 –

“The Journal al-Adab and transnational intellectual network between Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus”. In “Left-Wing Trends in the Arab World (1948-1979): Bringing the Transnational Back In”, Orient Institute, Beirut.