Forms of Protest: Political Art in the Digital and Urban Realm

IJIA’s Dialogues series brings together scholars and practitioners from across varied disciplines for a discussion of critical contemporary issues that interrogate the boundaries between architecture, art, anthropology, archaeology, and history. This session, the third instalment, was held as a webinar in February 2023 and hosted by IJIA Assistant Editor Eliana Abu-Hamdi, featuring Middle East scholars Jillian Schwedler, Deen Sharp, and Kyle Craig. Their conversation addressed the intersection of art, urban politics, and protest in the Middle East, broadly defined, in the form of public displays of sculpture and visual art (graffiti), especially as they are related to issues of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, and national identity. The conversation also extended to digital media and hashtag culture/activism, and to virtual identities. This is an edited excerpt from the original discussion.