The Iraqi Uprising and the Political Imagination
A Crown Seminar with Zahra Ali
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Missed the seminar? The recording is available with closed captioning.
Since October 2019, Iraq has been experiencing an unprecedented movement of popular protests that is mobilizing a new generation to demand radical political change. What do uprisings and mass protests tell us about power in the contemporary world? How do protesters both challenge and assert dominant power structures? In this talk, Zahra Ali argues that uprisings and mass protests expand the political and theoretical imagination in relation to life, violence, space, and emancipation. Taking the October 2019 uprising and recent mass protests in Iraq as a framework, Ali analyzes the relationship between the structural and the political, the social and the economic, the local and the global.
Zahra Ali is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Co-sponsored by the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies program, International and Global Studies program, and the Department of Sociology at Brandeis.