Asef Bayat, ‘Living in Revolution : The Everyday of the Arab Spring’

The University of London Institute in Paris is pleased to welcome Professor Asef Bayat for an on-site talk in which he will discuss his recent work on the everyday politics of the Arab Spring. This talk forms part of the Theory in Crisis series which platforms dynamic new work in contemporary theory.

Asef Bayat’s talk will be followed by a short response from Myriam Catusse (IFPO), a Q&A with the audience, and a drinks reception.

How to read the story of revolution? The conventional approach focuses largely on the elites, the state, regime, and international relations. I like to suggest that the story of revolution is not just what happened at the top. It is also about what went on at the base of the society among the grassroots—in farms, factories, families, and schools; in social relations governed by old hierarchies; in people’s subjectivities. Drawing on the Arab spring revolutions focusing on Tunisia and Egypt, I suggest that this approach can help us understand the relationship between everyday life as the realm of the ordinary, the mundane, and the routine, and revolutions as the domain of the extraordinary, the monumental, and rupture.

Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology and Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East.

Myriam Catusse is a sociologist and political scientist. Senior research fellow at the CNRS, she heads the Institut français du Proche Orient (Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Syria).

Her recent research focuses on the comparative analysis of a social issue specific to contemporary neoliberalism. She addresses the casualisation of social protection not at the margins, but in the core of public institutions for the socialisation of various risks. Analysing material claims, she questions the way protection and precariousness shape each other.

? Image credit: Pablo Valero 

Host or Publisher University of London Institute in Paris