Hummus For Thought

Quick Info on the Blog: Hummus For Thought has been my personal blog since 2011, and it has changed quite a lot over the years. You can also follow the Facebook page here and Twitter here.

Background: My name is Joey Ayoub, and I also go by Joey Husseini-Ayoub to include my mother’s family name. Born in 1991, I am of mixed Lebanese, Palestinian, Italian, French and Argentinian heritage, but I grew up in some village somewhere in Mount Lebanon not far from Beirut.

I have been a freelance writer and researcher for most of my adult life which, admittedly, isn’t that long.

My formative years, in many ways, were 2010-2013 during my undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut. In 2015, in the middle of the ‘You Stink’ protests, which I helped organise, I moved to London to do my MA.

My introduction to the decolonising education and the (smaller) decolonising anarchism movements has proven to be the most significant one so far, possibly only equalled by gender and masculinity studies, queer theory, indigenous movements, re-wilding and the politics of language. As you can imagine, it’s all a big and beautiful mess.

Projects: I am working on transforming this blog to a more organised one. It will keep its focus on Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, but we will be expanding to include international issues as well. It will be bilingual, in English and Arabic.

There is a podcast inspired by the awesome folks over at ‘The Irrelevant Arabs“. The podcast, which is simply called ‘Hummus For Thought‘, features discussions with interesting people from around the world about virtually everything.

Writing: I have been published in a number of publications such as Al Jazeera, AlJumhuriya.net, Raseef22, Global Voices Online, The New Arab (Al Araby), Pulse Media, IB Times, Middle East Eye, RS21 and El Diario, among others.

I am one of two regional editors for the Middle East and North Africa region for Global Voices Online, a position I’ve held since August 2016. I’m also MENA editor at IFEX.org.

Print Publications:

• “The Civil War’s Ghosts: Events of Memory Seen Through Lebanese Cinema” (Book Chapter, 2017).
• Book chapter on the intersectionality between African-American and Palestinian struggles (To be announced soon)
• My partner and I are working with Enab Baladi, the Syrian citizen newspaper, to publish a free e-book featuring translations of some of their best articles since 2012. We’re hoping to have it available in the coming months.

As most of you probably already know, being a freelancer doesn’t exactly provide a stable income. So, if you like my writing and want me to contribute to your book, journal or website, please get in touch -> J[dot]ayoub26[at]gmail[dot]com

Education, Research and Interests: I wrote my MA thesis on ‘Jewish Identity and Language Politics: Hebrew, Yiddish and the Contemporary Debate on Zionism” (SOAS). I previously did a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health (AUB). I started my PhD in October of 2017 on the Politics of the Postwar Cinema of Lebanon at the University of Edinburgh (UoE).

Research/Writing Interests include:

• Gender and Masculinity, Queer Studies
• Anarchist Modernity, Decolonising Anarchism
• Decolonising Education
• Politics of Language, Intersection between Politics and Linguistics. Case studies looked at so far: Hebrew-Arabic Bilingualism in Israel-Palestine, Historical debates on Yiddish and Hebrew among Ashkenazi Jews, Languages of Lebanon.
• The Impact of both the Lebanese Civil War and the Postwar Neoliberal ‘Reconstruction’ on Memory and Identity, Restlessness and Anxiety in Lebanon
• Rewilding Lebanon, inspired by Monbiot’s book ‘Feral’ and Rewilding projects across the world
• The Palestinian struggle
• History of Lebanese Jews
• The concept of Doikayt, or ‘here-ness’ in Yiddish, in Jewish thought
• The Syrian Revolution, Civil War and Global War
• Syrian literature, initially in translation and now also in Arabic
• Middle Eastern cinema, particularly Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema.