Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow
Dina Fergani is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto studying History of the Modern Middle East at the departments of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and Women and Gender Studies. Her research centers a rural Egyptian locality—Kamshish—and its relation to labour, land, and gender. Using patch work methodology she weaves oral histories, memoirs,and personal archives to show how the tradition of anticolonial resistance in Egypt was a project of subject-formation through labour. Before that, she was an activist and news-producer in Cairo for two years where she covered events of the Arab Spring.
Fellowship Project—Traditions that Endure: The Kamshish Rural Rebellion and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Egypt
My research project reconfigures the study of the tradition of anti-colonial resistance in Egypt by retelling the history of the Kamshish village rebellion through the lens of labour (1952-1971). While the literature explains anticolonial movements as an international project of nation-states aimed at political sovereignty, in this specific context, I show that anticolonialism was a project of shifting the ontology of Egyptians from peasants to workers through the process of labouring. I define labouring as an action embedded in social practice that causes the transformation of individual subjects. I use oral histories, personal archives, and published memoirs to tell this story.