{"id":11053,"date":"2025-12-18T12:07:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T11:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/?post_type=articles&p=11053"},"modified":"2025-12-18T12:15:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T11:15:27","slug":"community-archiving-in-egypt-and-the-challenge-of-getting-the-everyday-people-involved","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/community-archiving-in-egypt-and-the-challenge-of-getting-the-everyday-people-involved\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Archiving in Egypt and the Challenge of Getting the \u201cEveryday People\u201d Involved"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\nShubra\u2019s Archive partnership with PHACS, Status Check!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At the C\u00b2DH, and since 2020, prof. Thomas Cauvin<\/a>, Principal Investigator of the Public History as a New Citizen Science of the Past<\/a>\u201d (PHACS) project has been developing public history and participation beyond Luxembourg and Europe. PHACS aims to empower groups, associations, and users to learn from each other by developing, proposing, constructing and evaluating participatory public history frameworks. Since 2025, Dr. Myriam Dalal has been managing multiple international partnerships between PHACS and practitioners, collectives as well as institutions that are interested in exploring the questions of public history practices and community archiving from a Global South perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of these collaborations happens to be in Egypt, where Dr. Mina Ibrahim<\/a> and Yasmin T. Ismail lead the first community archiving initiative in one of Cairo\u2019s neighborhoods. As part of this collaboration<\/a>, PHACS and Shubra\u2019s Archive (or the Center for History and Social Research SARD) have been jointly leading discussions, events and workshops in Cairo Egypt, in Esch sur Alzette in Luxembourg, and online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n \u201f<\/span>\n Shubra\u2019s Archive is not meant to accumulate documents \u2013 it is meant to open a space for the community and the neighborhood to speak about what has been researched and collected.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Dr. Mina Ibrahim, founder of Shubra\u2019s Archive <\/p><\/div>\n <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n

Community archiving is, in essence, a co-production of curation and history for the present and the future. It proves to the \u201ceveryday people\u201d, that regardless of their cultural capital, their social background, their family status and where they sit on this fictional societal ladder, it tells them   that their histories are valuable not only in their individual and small family history, but also in building and shaping the collective memory of their neighbourhood, the history of their city and their country. Community archiving is also a way to ensure that things that matter to these people are not forgotten in an everchanging and unstable world, where political tensions or the digital abundance may lead to archival loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In building such a sense of collective curation of the past, communities can therefore come together and discuss the process of community archiving.They can make decisions together to ensure that future generations will have access to their roots before this precious history no longer exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The neighbourhood of Shubra has constituted a hub for academic research in historical, anthropological, and sociological fields for a few decades now, however it sometimes seems that all that research did not successfully reach or impact on the local population. And for Shubra\u2019s Archive, this was a main concern and one of the things that SARD\u2019s team tries to counter in their public programming strategies. For PHACS, this collaboration  helped in understanding the importance of both public history and community archives in popular neighbourhoods where people are always busy doing a million things other than archiving their past. Thanks to the community in Shubra that SARD has been working with for the past couple of years, the creation of an open-access public site to both produce and consume an archive for the community was made possible and continues to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\n View from the public history workshop conducted by PHACS in Cairo in May 2025. Myriam Dalal. <\/p>\n <\/figure>\n\n\n

Dr. Mina Ibrahim first visited the C\u00b2DH as part of the Global South fellowship program in 2025. His lecture on Archival Practices: In Praise of Silence, Inaccessibility, and Incompleteness<\/a> presented Shubra\u2019s Archive and what it means to do community archiving in such a neighbourhood. And since the new collaboration started between both parties in Luxembourg and Egypt, the past few months have been a learning experience for both the PHACS team and the Shubra\u2019s Archive team. In addition to a series of workshops and events, PHACS supported a series of community scanning days, where the team in Cairo invited people in the community to bring their personal archives to help them digitize and document them.All of this can be seen on Shubra\u2019s Archive website<\/a> which PHACS is proudly the main sponsor!<\/p>\n\n\n

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