Miriyam Aouragh

Miriyam is an Urban Citizen Fellow at NIAS during 2023-2024.

Professor Miriyam Aouragh grew up in Amsterdam as a second generation Dutch-Moroccan. She has a background in cultural anthropology and non-Western sociology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and is a researcher at CAMRI. Aouragh has studied the implications of the internet as it was first introduced (“Web 1.0”) in Palestine (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2000-2008) to understand in particular the significance of techno-­social evolutions by analysing how a "new" technology coincided with the outbreak of a mass uprising (Second Intifada 2000-2005). Aouragh subsequently (Rubicon NWO) focused on the political role of new digital tools and spaces, such as how these earlier developments evolved to so-called "Web 2.0" as manifested through blogging and social networking and so-called “Web 2.0”. Her ethnographic fieldwork were conducted among grassroots activism in Lebanon and Palestine (Oxford Internet Institute, 2009-2011). Aouragh set-up a critical research project (Leverhulme 2013-2016) to study the Arab (Counter-)Revolutions. She relates critical theory with online-offline dialects. She was selected to become TNI Fellow in acknowledgement of her public impact (2023-2028), in 2023 she won a full fellowship for the Institute for Advanced Studies to work on a review of her research on Palestinian internet spanning two decades. In 2024 she received the Swiss Foundation grant (CO-I) for the international project lnfrastructural rehearsals: creative responses to the green and digital transition.

Apart from 4 books Palestine Online (IB Tauris 2011); (with Hamza Hamouchene) The Arab Spring a decade on (TNI 2022); Mediating the Makhzan about the (r)evolutionary dynamics in Morocco (forthcoming CUP) and (with Paula Chakravartty) Infrastructures of Empire (forthcoming), Miriyam Aouragh has written numerous chapters and articles (see Publications/Output).