Alaa Badr is a postdoctoral researcher at the Contemporary History of the Arab World Chair at the Collège de France, under the supervision of Professor Henry Laurens. She is also a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris (Menton campus).
D. in Political Science from the European University Institute (EUI, Florence), under the supervision of Olivier Roy (EUI), her research focuses on the intellectual history, political theory and cultural studies of the contemporary Arab world. Her thesis, entitled " Contributions toward the Remaking of the Arab Intellectual Scene, Informal Intellectual Collectives ", examines the emergence of new forms of intellectual sociability in the post-revolutionary Arab world. Through three case studies, parallel education movements in Egypt, literary collectives, and political satire, it highlights informal collectives operating on the margins of established academic and cultural institutions, which share four common characteristics : they operate as collective groups ; they exercise their critique from the cultural field in response to the closure of the political sphere ; they resort to new digital media to ensure their dissemination ; and they embody a form of political engagement that literary theorist Ayman El Desouky conceptualizes under the termʿamāra. She is currently preparing the publication of a book resulting from this thesis, entitled The Remaking of the Arab Intellectual.
Her postdoctoral research extends this reflection towards the recomposition of the Arab intellectual and cultural scene in the post-2011 era, with a particular interest in Arab cultural producers in exile in Paris. Through the study of spaces such as Maktabat Berfin and The Wrong Side, she interrogates emerging practices of cultural criticism, the dynamics of linguistic belonging and displacement, and the formation of a new critical vocabulary specific to the post-revolutionary Arab generation. These investigations are based on fieldwork conducted between Cairo, notably with the 10 Tooba and Tahayuzz collectives, and Paris.
Her work in progress includes a collective volume co-edited with Olivier Roy, entitled Culture as Critique in the Arab World, as well as a forthcoming chapter in a book edited by Sari Hanafi and Borut Rončević devoted to public pedagogy as a vector of social transformation in post-2011 Arab societies. Her publications include contributions to MadaMasr, ArabPop Magazine (Tamu Edizioni, 2023) and the Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo. At Sciences Po Menton, she teaches courses on the production of knowledge in the contemporary Arab world, Arab popular culture and the Arabic language.
