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As argued by scholars such as Lina Khatib, Ariella Azoulay and W. J. T. Mitchell, the production and circulation of images recorded by citizens played a crucial role during the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The use of images attracted global attention, mobilized action and actively performed the protests' crucial aims to renegotiate the country's body and image politics. The inherent act of protest in citizen photography and the "war of presence" spilled over into the act of archiving the protests as a form of resistance in itself. Consequently, a large number of online archive projects were launched during the 2011 uprising. What role does this large body of visual material and the online archives that store it play today, eight years after the outbreak of the uprising? With a focus on Egypt, this paper asks whether the dynamics of these archives "died" with the violent crackdown on public protest and the increased censorship imposed on citizens by the current military regime. Through an examination of archive "858: An Archive of Resistance" by Mosireen Collective, I propose ways in which digital archives containing images produced by civilians serve as sites on which the "war of presence" can continue to be fought within present-day Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a group of five related post- Byzantine Akathistos cycles, Strophe 11 is illustrated with a scene that depicts Joseph and the Virgin with Christ on her arms standing in front of kneeling people who welcome them. That scene is different from the Flight into Egypt scene that served as a standard choice for the illustration of the strophe in most of the Akathistos cycles. This essay seeks to answer the question: why was that unusual iconography introduced?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1950s, the religious growth of Egypt's Coptic Christians has been shaped by diasporic migrations abroad, resulting in new ritual outcomes of representing their cultural and moral origins of communal coherence and periphery. This article approaches the modernizing aspects of Orthodox dispersion from their foundationally mediating locus in holy parts, and more specifically in relics and their technical continuities and discontinuities. Entering into the communicative exhibition of St. Marina's right hand in Egypt, it studies the practical extensions of remembering martyrs across space and time. Relic technics via sensory techniques and cinematic technologies create the very special living properties and metamorphic effects of divine imagination. Ultimately, in gesturing to the materialities of a post-natural body, it seeks to think through what felt fragmentability does for the geographic transmission of a communal body politic--i.e. the material making of the Coptic Orthodox "global" community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article examines the political and public culture of Coptic Christian miracles through the circulation and reproduction of images and the mimetic entanglements of artifacts and objects. To understand the threat posed by one case of a woman's oil-exuding hand, this study points to how semiotic orders of security and sacramentality intersect in the regulation of bodily miracles. It explores Coptic Orthodox Church and Egyptian state efforts to contain the activity of images and transform the public nature of truthful witness and divine testimony. In doing so, it suggests how the material structure of saintly imagination introduces bodily and visual challenges to an authoritarian politics of public order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter offers a symbolic perspective on the Egyptian Revolution. It does so by analyzing the transformation of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian man beaten to death by police on June 6, 2010, into a key visual injustice symbol. Activists were motivated by a horrifying cell phone photograph of Said taken by his family at the morgue and uploaded on the web. Although the postmortem photograph had a powerful emotional impact in itself, the transformation of Said from local/particular incident to injustice symbol with society-wide repercussions cannot be explained by its mere availability in the public sphere. The transformation required intervention and appropriation by activists who creatively and strategically universalized the case, linking it with existing injustice frames in Egypt. This chapter analyzes this interplay between photographs, activism, and society in two steps. The first provides an analysis of the genesis of the Said symbol and identifies three levels of agency in its formation. The second step analyzes the process through which Said was infused with injustice meanings by activists. Providing the first systematic analysis of Said from a social movement perspective, the chapter draws on several data sources that are subjected to interpretive analysis." visual material available on the internet, Facebook pages, and interviews with and accounts by key activists. And it calls for more attention to photographs and symbols in the analysis of activism and points to several historical and present cases with relevance for such an approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]