The Civic Media Center will host a talk on current events and issues in Palestine with artist Majed Badra and university professor Dr. Said Abdelwahed on Tuesday, February 28th beginning at 7pm.
Palestinian political cartoonist Majed Badra is in town as a visiting artist and student at the Sequential Artists Workshop, a recently opened comic art school that shares the building with the Civic Media Center (CMC).
Dr. Said Abdelwahed is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Alazhar University in Gaza. He is the author of a recently-published book on the 2008 Israeli war on Gaza. He will join the conversation via Skype, live from Gaza.
Mr. Badra will present a series of his political cartoons and use them as a basis for discussing the impact of current events on the daily lives of Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza. He will describe the psychological and physical impacts on the people of Gaza due to the Israeli war of 2008-2009 and the ongoing embargo, as well as other issues impacting Palestinian civil society, speaking from his own experience as well as from the daily headlines that his cartoons caricature.
Dr. Abdelwahed will read from and discuss his book, The Message from Gaza, a detailed chronicle of the 2008-2009 war. Professor Said Abdelwahed is one of the three bloggers at "Moments of Gaza" who have been providing on-the-ground news and observations from Gaza since December 2008. Dr. Abdelwahed's blogs struck a chord with Mari Oka, professor of Islamic and Middle East studies at Kyoto University, who translated and collected the posts into a book published by Sedosha in Tokyo. The Message from Gaza was the first book to document part of the war on Gaza from inside.