Monday 9 May 2016

Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East


POPULAR POLITICS IN THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 

with Dr John Chalcraft (Government, LSE)

5pm (5.15 start) - 6.45pm, Tue 10 May
Room 1, Mill Lane Lecture Theatres

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In this seminar John Chalcraft introduces his new book Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, a new history of revolutions, uprisings, movements, and diverse forms of protest from Morocco to Iran from the eighteenth century to the present. The focus is on unruly collective action: the emergence of new, fragile collective subjects and transgressive forms of contention. Writing against socioeconomic and discursive determinism alike, the book is particularly concerned to analyse the active agencies shaping mobilizing projects: forms of moral, political and intellectual leadership, trans-local appropriation, intellectual labour, normative commitments, and modes of organization, strategies and tactics. It challenges existing forms of Orientalism and teleological modernism by foregrounding the ways in which movements are situated within, and have shaped, the rise, establishment, reform and attrition of political hegemony.

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JOHN CHALCRAFT is an Associate Professor in the History and Politics of Empire/ Imperialism at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previous posts include a Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His research focuses on labour, migration and contentious mobilisation in the Middle East. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: crafts and guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004) and The Invisible Cage: Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2009). His new book Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

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The aim of these seminars is to integrate radical theory with political practice and activism. Each consists of a presentation followed by a Q&A session (and trip to the Anchor pub round the corner). We record each session, so if you can't make it, like our pages so you get updated once the video is uploaded. Organised with the help of Cambridge Defend Education (CDE) and Cambridgeshire Left.

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Upcoming talks for Easter 2016 (see our FB page and termcard for more)

Tue 17 May | Nadia Fadil (KU, Leuven), "Enough with excuses!”: The Brussels and Paris attacks and the dilemmas of public anthropology
Audit Room, King's College

Tue 24 May | Lydia Wilson (Oxford), Understanding ISIS and forming policy

Tue 31 May | The UK and Cambridge housing crisis - an open dialogue
Sociology seminar room

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