A Cognitive Arab Uprising?: Paradigm Shifts in Arab Social Sciences

Drawing on previous work on knowledge production in the Arab world in the last decade, this talk will contribute to the debate about how scholarship in the Arab region has struggled with some dichotomies before being able to partially transgress them. 

Sari Hanafi will present different research trends that have evolved from mainstream critical “glocal” (global/local) trends to the more polarised ones of postcolonial and Islamic perspectives. He will highlight how these trends vary according where the social sciences are produced in the Arab World (ACSS, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, universities vs research centers outside universities, NGOs, etc.).

About the speaker

Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of the Islamic Studies program at the American University of Beirut.  He was the President of the International Sociological Association (2018-2023). He was also the editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic) (2017-2022).  Recently he created the “Portal for Social impact of scientific research in/on the Arab World” (Athar). He was the Vice President of the board of the Arab Council of Social Science (2015-2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) (1994). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the sociology of religion; connection of  moral philosophy to the social sciences; the sociology of (forced) migration applied to the Palestinian refugees; politics of scientific research. Among his recent books are: Studying Islam in the Arab World: The Rupture Between Religion and the Social Sciences (2024 in Routledge); Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise. (with R. Arvanitis) ; The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (co-edited with A. Salvatore and K. Obuse); He is the winner of 2014 Abdelhamid Shouman Award and 2015 Kuwait Award for social science. In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) form the National University of San Marcos (the first and the leading university in Lima- Peru – established in 1551). In 2022 he became lifetime corresponding fellow of the British Academy. His forthcoming book “Against Symbolic liberalism: A plea for dialogical sociology” (Liverpool Univ. Press) 

Chair

• Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations, SOAS

This event is hosted by SOAS DevTraC