The keynote speech by Salwa Ismail, as part of the workshop Spaces of everyday life, Spaces of contestation: Urban space as lived and fought for (18th – 19th, November), is simultaneously functioning as the Badaro Talks -lecture of November.

When: Tuesday 18th of November at 5 pm.

Where: The Fime premises at 30 Badaro Street

You can also attend online.

RSVP: We kindly request you to RSVP through this link, or by sending an email to institute@fime.fi at the latest on Monday 17th of November.

Abstract

This talk addresses how, during the first year of the 2011 Syrian Uprising, mobilised urban neighbourhoods were transformed into revolutionary spaces. It explores how under conditions of extreme surveillance and repression, political subjects emerged through insurgent place-making. Departing from prevalent approaches to the political agency of marginalised urban actors in authoritarian settings, the account foregrounds the politics of rupture—rather than evasion, invisibility, or recognition—as central to understanding contentious action from below. The analysis introduces the concept of the revolutionary neighbourhood (al-ḥayy al-thāʾir) as a socio-spatial formation produced by oppositional subjects through spatially inscribed resistance that is not contained by state repression.

Bio

Salwa Ismail is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research examines everyday forms of government, urban governance, and governmental violence. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in both Egypt and Syria, enquiring into how mechanisms of government and practices of violence come to be formative of ordinary citizens’ political subjectivities. Her publications include Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (University of Minnesota Press 2006), and The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (Cambridge University Press 2018). Her recent work has appeared in Political Geography and is forthcoming in Antipode.

Picture: Demonstration in Douma, a Damascus suburb, against the Assad government on 8 April 2011. Wikimedia Commons, shamsnn.