Guide for Learning

The archive can be used for independent study and research, or material may be incorporated by teachers into their taught courses. This page presents different pathways for using the website, depending upon your level of knowledge about Egypt and on your aims.

Pathways

Introduction for Learning

Politics, Popular Culture and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution is a digital archive documenting the 25 January 2011 uprising and its aftermath through the prism of popular culture. It has been designed for both researchers and students interested in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, contemporary Egypt and the relationship between politics and popular culture more broadly. For more details about the archive and the project underpinning it, please see the ‘About’ page, accessible from the menu bar.

The archive mainly includes materials from 25 January 2011 until early 2019, with a handful of items predating 2011. These dates do not necessarily reflect a universally agreed timeline of the revolution. Some regard the ‘revolution’ as corresponding with the first 18 days of protests, beginning on 25 January 2011. Others have argued that the revolution began before 2011, with the emergence of oppositional and protest movements after 2000. Meanwhile, others consider the revolution to be ongoing, as reflected in the slogan, ‘the revolution continues’ (in Arabic, ‘al-thawra mustamira’). Deciding when the revolution starts and ends is, therefore, part of the debates over the meanings of the revolution itself. The end date for the archive merely reflects the end date of funding for the project underpinning the archive.

A note on dates

Each archive item includes two dates: 'date published' and 'date created'. 'Date published' refers to the date that an item was made available on-line (e.g. uploaded to YouTube or published on a website). Sometimes, the date of publication is much later than the date the item was originally created. Since it is important for researchers and students to be able to understand archive items in relation to the specific socio-political context in which they were created, therefore we added the category of 'date created', which reflects the date that the item was actually produced, which often corresponds with particular moments in the revolution. 

A note on the transliteration of Arabic names

There exist conventions for transliterating modern standard Arabic into the Latin alphabet (for example, see here). Where appropriate (for example, titles of some novels and films), these conventions, or simplified versions of them, have been used. However, given that this is an archive of popular culture, which mainly uses Egyptian vernacular Arabic, we have transliterated many names and titles in the way that they would be pronounced in Egyptian colloquial Arabic.

Where there are commonly known transliterations of names of individuals or places (for example, ‘Bassem Youssef’ or ‘Suez’), we have used these names. In some cases, there may be variations in how names are transliterated in English-language media (for example, ‘Lamis Elhadidy’ and  ‘Lamis El-Hadidy’ both exist on the internet).  Therefore, where possible, we have included alternative spellings as tags.

Share your experiences

We would like to hear from you. Please use the ‘Contact Us’ on-line form to tell us about your experiences of using the archive for research, independent study, teaching or anything else. For what purpose did you use the archive? Which aspects of the archive did you find most useful? Do you have suggestions for improving the archive? Thank you!