Speaker: Atef Said
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
Talk Description
Atef Said presents few key threads from his book Revolution Squared (Duke U Press 2024) about the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 and the military counter-revolution in its aftermath. He demonstrates the expansive range of liberatory possibilities and containment at the heart of every revolution. Drawing on historical analysis and his own participation in the revolution, Said outlines the importance of Tahrir Square and other physical spaces as well as the role of social media and digital spaces. While presenting the notion of lived contingency, Said charts the lived contingencies of Egyptian revolutionaries from the decade prior to the revolution’s outbreak to its peak and the so-called transition to democracy to the 2013 military coup into the present.
Speaker’s Bio
Atef Said is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research engages with the fields of sociological theory, political sociology, historical sociology, sociology of the Middle East, and global sociology. He the author of Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities and Counter-Revolution in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2024). Said’s work is published in academic journals such as Social Problems, Social Research, International Sociology, Sociology Compass, Contemporary Sociology, and Middle East Critique. His work also has appeared in important scholarly references such as the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East and the I.B. Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East, and important scholarly books such as Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges. Before transitioning to academia, Said worked as a human rights attorney and researcher in Egypt, from 1995 to 2004. While there, he practiced human rights law and directed research initiatives at a number of human rights organizations. He also wrote two books, Torture in Egypt: A Judicial Reality (2000), published by the Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners, and Torture Is a Crime Against Humanity (2008), published by the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. Both organizations are based in Cairo, Egypt.