My formative years were 2010-2013 during my undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) where I did a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health. I lived in Hamra, Beirut between 2012 and 2014 and briefly in Achrafieh before moving back to my hometown in Mount Lebanon.
In 2015, in the middle of the ‘You Stink’ protests, which I helped organise, I moved to London to do my MA in Cultural Studies at SOAS, University of London. My MA thesis was entitled ‘Jewish Identity and Language Politics: Hebrew, Yiddish and the Contemporary Debate on Zionism”.
I lived in London between 2015 and 2017 where I was part of the SOAS Palestine Society (2015-2016) and the SOAS Syria Society (2016-2017). In October of 2017, I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where I started doing a PhD on Lebanese cinema at the University of Edinburgh. After a (fairly public) falling out with the university two years in, I left it.
2020-
I am now continuing the PhD at the University of Zurich where I am an associate doctoral researcher on the Dissonant Narratives team. This project is a study about temporality, or the way we perceive time, in postwar Lebanese cinema between the years 1990 and 2018. The case is made in this thesis that the Lebanese civil war produced its own temporality, only to be then interpreted/re-imagined in postwar Lebanon/Lebanese cinema. This requires a shift from our usual understanding of linear time to accommodate the reality of a “protracted now”, coined by Walid Sadek, in which the line between past and future is often blurred. The protracted now sets the temporal context of this thesis, a way of studying the past/future while recognising that movies are produced in the present. Thus, this project will ask: how is temporality conceived of in postwar Lebanese cinema when the past is contested and the future is uncertain?
Affiliations: I am a research associate of Lebanon Support, a member of the Middle East Studies Association, British Sociological Association, Lebanese Studies Association, Citizens, Nations and Migration (CNaM) Network at the University of Edinburgh, Council for British Research in the Levant and Anarchist Studies Network (ASN). I’m also a fellow of Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum (GMF) and, of course, a member of the IFEX and Global Voices communities.
Past: Long Now Foundation
joey husseini ayoub 