UC Davis historian Omnia el Shakry sees that the inaugural workshop promises to create a multi-university and multi-country consortium devoted to student and scholarly exchange. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
In this Spotlight
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- "A cultural ambassador uses ties with Arab universities to help forge pact" — Suad Joseph
- "Reflecting on UC Davis' Building Bridges effort toward peace" — Kais Menoufy
- "Partnerships will prepare UC Davis students for global citizenship" — Omnia El Shakry
Partnerships will prepare UC Davis students for global citizenship
Imagine a bustling city of 20 million or so inhabitants — located at the proverbial crossroads of ancient and modern civilizations. This is Cairo.
It is a city that is as much a home to the antiquities that world travelers trek around the globe to visit as it is to all the trappings one would expect of a modern polity and economy: a bustling public transportation system and a seemingly endless array of newly built apartment buildings.
It is this intersection of the ancient and the modern that makes Cairo, the city of my birth, such a stimulating place to live and work.
This past March, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef and a UC Davis delegation visited Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, in an ongoing effort to expand the campus's involvement abroad and to build bridges between two parts of the world that have much more in common than political pundits would like us to believe.
Promise for a multi-university
The visit's inaugural workshop spawned a series of meetings that promised to create a multi-university and multi-country consortium focused primarily, but not exclusively, on student and scholarly exchange. As I looked around the room that first day, I recognized individuals I knew from Davis as well as Cairo.
The initial meeting took place at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library of the American University in Cairo — the university where I did my undergraduate work and the library where I had conducted some of my most exciting primary-source research for my book on the history of 20th century Egyptian social science.
Standing in that building and having a conversation with Assistant Chancellor Maril Stratton about Sonallah Ibrahim, my favorite Egyptian novelist — was exhilarating.
It is always exciting to share the literature and history of the place one has devoted decades to studying but well nigh impossible to share it with them in the actual locale where it was produced!
‘It is always exciting to share the literature and history of the place one has devoted decades to studying but well nigh impossible to share it with them in the actual locale where it was produced!’
Omnia El Shakry
Ties based on gender scholarship
While Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef's visit focused on building academic bridges in key growth sectors of the Egyptian economy, another smaller group of scholars gathered to discuss and establish scholarly relations on the topic of gender.
BCBCB, as Professor Suad Joseph has affectionately coined our initiative, stands for Beirut, Cairo, Beirut, California and Birzeit, referring to the locales and universities involved in the multi-country collaborative initiative focused on gender.
Seven years of dedicated effort by Suad Joseph, the dynamic director of Middle East/South Asia Studies at UC Davis — has gathered an array of gender scholars who work on topics as diverse as gender justice, oral history and poverty.
Eye toward equitable exchanges
The goal of the initiative is to help create synergistic connections between scholars who work on gender and are based in the Middle East region and those based in the U.S. Like the chancellor's visit, our group's meeting focused on scholarly and student exchange with an eye toward equitable exchanges.
We have much to learn from each other, we concluded, by visiting our respective institutions, developing courses together, and exchanging ideas.
As UC Davis increasingly thinks of internationalizing its curriculum, it is important to ask ourselves how we view the production of international knowledge. Scholars have long moved away from thinking about the production of knowledge as uni-directional.
Rather, we now acknowledge that knowledge moves, quite freely, from places like Cairo and Beirut to the U.S., and not simply from the West to the non-West.
The promise of student exchanges with Egypt — of enabling students to read about, as well as see and hear, for example, female judges and debates on constitutional reform — offers up the possibility of preparing UC Davis students for truly global citizenship.