Loading
CITIES UNBOUND
Exploring Social 'Non-Movements' in the Urban Middle East Asef Bayat (
Thursday October 11, 2012 | 05:30 -07:15 PM | Sociology

Exploring Social 'Non-Movements' in the Urban Middle East
Asef Bayat (Professor Sociology and Mideast Studies, Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana)

Oct. 11: 5:30-7:15
Sociology (Building 120, Main Quad) 215

Abstract: This talk is about collective agency in times of constraints. It explores what the subaltern groups (in the Middle East) do to get around and resist the sever constraints the authoritarian polity, neo-liberal economics, and moral authorities on their civil and economic rights. I discuss the diverse ways in which the ordinary people--men, women, and the young--strive to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian regimes, and by discovering or generating spaces within which they can assert their rights. I conceptualize these everyday practices in terms of social 'non-movements'. At the end, I will try to address a number of analytical challenges to the concept of 'social non-movement.