Hi @FirstName,

Welcome to our second session of 'Bridges Inside: Prison and Health' for 2025. This discussion will take place on Thursday, the 11th of September, from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm in the Rogers Room (N397) in the John Woolley Building. In this session, we're excited to be joined 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.

To access the required readings, please download the following chapters from the copy available on the University of Sydney Library website (Library login required):

'Foreword: Texts That Survived the Ashes' by Ahmed Naji
'Introduction' by Collective Antigone
'When the Law Is Not the Law Anymore', 'Death's Child', 'On the Vigil of the Arrest', and 'About Prison, Books, Chaos of the Mind, and the State Security Officer' by Sanaa Seif

To access the recommended readings, please click on the following links:

'An open letter' by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, translated by Ahdaf Soueif
'Our bodies and enmity: A personal introduction' by Alaa Abd el-Fattah
'Not a hunger artist: Laila Soueif and the silence of the state' by Sarah A. Rifkey

Don't worry about the number of readings — a majority are only a couple of pages each.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Kind regards,

Amie Doan

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Contact the host of Bridges Inside: Prison and Health (September)

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