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Transcending Sectarianism: Counter-Media in Post-War Lebanon
University of Oxford
Sophie Chamas
This presentation will draw on my DPhil project, which examines civic and cultural activism
in Lebanon during the post-civil war period. My project focuses on the work of a number of
Lebanese activist collectives, filmmakers, artists, musicians, cultural organisers, writers,
editors and media personalities, investigating the potential of their discursive and
performative interventions to enable non-sectarian ways of being Lebanese.
Rather than promoting particularistic identities in a country scarred by communalisms, such
strategies, I will argue, direct attention towards nationally legible experiences of suffering,
promoting humanistic empathy for others whose potential is also being limited by the
conditions of life in Lebanon.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conception of ethics as a kind of relationship that one ought
to have with oneself, I will ask how, in a particular time and place, segments of Lebanese
society are intervening in a specific problem-space and initiating new projects of becoming.
Drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Henrik Vigh and Bjorn Thomassen, I will
approach the Lebanese post-civil war period as one of prolonged crisis, examining the
possibilities for action that a context of chronic crisis enables.
This presentation will focus on discursive media such as film, writing, satirical television and
music, examining the counter-understanding of the Lebanese condition they construct, and
the non-sectarian sensibilities, attitudes, values and actions they promote. Can these
discursive sites and pedagogical practices, I will ask, create conditions for a transcending of
sectarian dispositions by redirecting debate, potentially enabling the trumping of
sensibilities, values and concerns considered problematic and divisive by other, more
unifying ones?