Social Movement Workshop: Hashem Alrefai and Rana Sukarieh

An intercampus exchange of advanced social movement scholarship

Friday, April 29, 2022 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EDT
Online (Zoom)

Friday, April 29, 2022 at 2:00 pm (EST)

Presenters: Hashem Alrefai (Univ. of Pittsburgh) and Rana Sukarieh (York University)

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Join us for a discussion on cutting-edge research carried out by advanced PhD students, faculty, postdocs, and movement-based activist scholars. This workshop is a new collaborative exchange between academic institutions with specialties in social movement research.

Presenter: Hashem Alrefai

Hashem is interested in studying social movements in the context of a totalitarian state. Also, he is interested in learning social movements' interactions with the forms of the contemporary state's despotism, especially in knowing how modern Arab societies formed after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and how new states rebuilt a new social identity.

"How do ordinary people become political opponents in an authoritarian state?"

Based on in-depth interviews with ten Saudi men and women dissidents, this presentation explores the reasons for opposing the Saudi regime in the period following the appointment of Mohammed bin Salman as the Saudi regime's crown prince after September 2017. It is noteworthy that many Saudi citizens decided to leave Saudi Arabia and organize opposition to the Saudi regime since the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. This discussion would explore the dynamics of growth of political opposition in relationship to changing styles of rule, power structure, conceptions of legitimacy, and the cost of repression. I argue that indiscriminate repression contributed to increasing the degree of solidarity with victims of political repression, leading some “ordinary people” to acquire a new identity as political opponents. According to the political process theory, when the regime becomes closed, the ability to mobilize will decrease, but the opposite seems to be happening in this case. In this light, the discussion would explore how the opposition was less mobilized when the governing system was relatively more "open" (between 2010 and 2015), but it became more mobilized when the governing system became more "closed" after 2015.

Presenter: Rana Sukarieh

Rana Sukarieh is a sociology instructor at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Her Ph.D. dissertation at York University examines the interplay of endogenous and exogenous factors shaping the trajectory of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in Toronto. Her latest co-authored article is "Publics Forums in the Algerian and Lebanese hiraks or autonomy in the making". Her research interests are in transnational social movements, solidarity movements, social movements in the Arab region, critical research methods, and postcolonial studies.

"Building Sustained Solidarity with The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement in Toronto : An Intergenerational Analysis"

This presentation integrates a temporal analysis to understand the local and transnational dynamics that led to the fragmentation of the once relatively unified Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto. A temporal analysis accounts for the variations of the political contexts, and the birth of the “War on Terror” generation, in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragic events and the consequent surge in the demonization of the Arab, Muslim, and other people of color. By challenging the linear assumption of temporality in theories of generation, this presentation suggests that Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Mbembe’s entangled temporality should be considered in the context of Palestinian and Arab Canadian social justice activism. This perspective challenges the rupture created by transformative events, that are associated with the formation of new generations, and illuminates the sedimented values and ideas that the “War on Terror” generation inherited from the previous generations, (i.e. the “Oslo generation” and the “Revolution generation”) thereby contesting the reified boundaries that activists themselves have build between generations.