Professor Hatem will discuss how the intellectual debate did not pay much attention to youth and gender before the Arab uprisings and how the political debate in Egypt has since the revolution blamed youth movements for everything that went wrong. In her conclusion, Hatem will evaluate what these groups can tell us about the direction of change in the Egypt.

Hatem is professor of political science at Howard University in Washington DC and is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. International relations and the comparative politics of the Middle East are her main areas. Her overall published work explores how gender emerged as a contested marker of modern Islamic societies from the nineteenth century onwards. It was used by modernists and Islamists alike to distinguish their blueprints for Islamic modern societies and what distinguished them from western modernity. Hatem earned her MA from the American University in Cairo, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.