Yasemin Ipek, Assistant Professor, Global Affairs Program, received funding to write a book on diverse meanings and implications of being an activist in Lebanon.
The book, titled: “Crisiswork: Activism, Class-Making, and Bounded Futures in Lebanon,” will be a study of the emergent forms of activism and political subjectivity in contemporary Lebanon in relation to lived experiences of crisis.
Ipek aims to answer the question: “How has the recent mobilization of civil society activism shaped politics and everyday life in Lebanon?”
She intends to answer that question by ethnographically studying activism as a contentious field of translocal encounters between a wide range of self-identified activists such as unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class consultants, leftist intellectuals, and humanitarian workers.
Ipek defines “crisiswork” as everyday activist practices that sought to transform both individual moralities and affects as well as political and social structures to solve Lebanon’s crises.
She posits that crisiswork broadened the scope of the political by redefining activism as a struggle to undo crises within both the political system and everyday life.
Rather than studying activism either as reproduction of or resistance to power, she examines activism as a field of contradictory processes. She does this by drawing on decolonial approaches that emphasize differences among seemingly unified activists, and employing an intersectional analysis of entanglements of sect, class, race, and gender.
Ipek received $40,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for this project. Funding began in Jan. 2023 and will end in Dec. 2023.
Ipek’s book will be the first book-length ethnography of civil society and activism in Lebanon. In addition to demonstrating the complexity of everyday struggles and civil society activism in Lebanon, the book will provide an analytical framework for understanding how people in different parts of the world continually generate new political imaginations and (un) belongings in the contexts of ongoing precarity.
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