Yasemin Ipek, assistant professor in the Global Affairs Program, has received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. This prestigious grant supports early career scholars “whose work has the potential to transform our understanding of what it means to be human.” (https://wennergren.org/program/hunt-postdoctoral-fellowship/) As a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Ipek will be on leave during the Spring and Fall 2023 semesters to complete her current book project.
Dr. Ipek’s book project, titled Crisiswork: Activism, Class-Making, and Bounded Futures in Lebanon, is a study of emergent forms of activism and political subjectivity in contemporary Lebanon in relation to lived experiences of crisis. Since 2011, the war in neighboring Syria has paralyzed Lebanon’s already fragile politics and economy, leaving many Lebanese feeling stuck in recurrent crises. To address these crises, diverse groups in Lebanon mobilized within civil society (al-mujtamaʿal-madanī) and increasingly called themselves activist (nāshiṭ). Dr. Ipek’s book offers an ethnographic study of 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 entrepreneurs, and humanitarian workers. Having spent time with activists in different spaces of everyday life such as work, family, and leisure, Dr. Ipek theorizes diverse and competing meanings of being an activist by drawing on decolonial approaches and interdisciplinary debates on crisis, social class, ethics, affects, and temporality. She accomplishes that through an intersectional analysis of entanglements of class, sect, religiosity, race, and gender, which helps her document manifold tensions and contradictions of practicing activism and enacting political agency in contemporary 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 continually generate new political imaginations and (un) belongings in the contexts of ongoing precarity.
January 25, 2023
