Bridges Inside: Prison and Health (September)

Texts

Required

Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated (2025) by Collective Antigone

Recommended

‘An open letter’ (2014) by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, translated by Ahdaf Soueif

‘Our bodies and enmity: a personal introduction’ (2020) by Alaa Abd el-Fattah

‘Not a hunger artist: Laila Soueif and the silence of the state’ (2025) by Sarah A. Rifky

“At 4 pm today, I celebrated with my colleagues my last meal in prison.”

-       Alaa Abd el-Fattah, ‘An open letter’

“A hunger strike in prison is a protest like no other,” writes Nayan Shah in the introduction to Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes. By refusing sustenance from the prison authorities, the striking prisoner turns their body into a site of protest, staking their lives to communicate their grievances against the state. In this situation, prison authorities are forced to assume responsibility for the hunger striker, to heed or ignore their demands. Above all, however, authorities are often anxious to prevent the striker from dying in custody. As Shah notes in Refusal to Eat, “[strikers] reclaim the meaning and course of dying and wield it as a threat, but most significantly as an opportunity to have their demands for change be heard by the authorities and the public.”

The September session of ‘Bridges Inside: Prison and Health’ will examine prison hunger strikes in the context of Egypt’s carceral regime. The discussion will be guided by our special guests, Lucia Sorbera, a scholar of Egyptian feminism from the University of Sydney, and Mark Levine, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history from the University of California Irvine. Both Lucia and Mark are members of Collective Antigone, a team of Egyptian and international scholars, human rights defenders, and activists supporting prisoners of conscience in Egypt. In 2025, Collective Antigone published Imprisoning a Revolution, a collection of prison writings by incarcerated Egyptians, many of them ‘unknown’ to the international community. The first part of the session will centre on the history and current state of incarceration in Egypt, illustrated in Imprisoning a Revolution. In the second part, the conversation will turn to prison hunger strikes in the context of the Egyptian carceral regime, focusing on the case of Laila Soueif, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, and Sanaa Seif.

Links to the reading will be mailed to participants upon registration. Please email bridges.inside@sydney.edu.au if you have any questions.