Image: Antonio Gramsci by Gabriele Cancedda. Source: Gramscimania
We are delighted to announce an upcoming international conference on Gramsci in the Middle East and North Africa, to be convened at the London School of Economics (LSE).
The conference is organized by the LSE Middle East Centre in cooperation with the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) and the Politics of the Margins Research Project at Ghent University. This conference is supported by the Departments of Government, Sociology, and the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme based at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
Download the conference pack here.
Register here
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We live in a time of global crisis marked by uprisings, revolutions and an urgent need to imagine different futures, not least in the Middle East and North Africa.
In thinking about our contemporary moment in historical context, Antonio Gramsci has emerged as a popular theorist in work focused on resistance, revolution, popular movements, capitalism, political economy, memory, temporality, transnationalism and internationalism.
This conference aims to bring together scholars working with Gramsci on any of these themes, with the ultimate aim of publishing a Special Issue on Gramsci in the Middle East and North Africa.
Gramscian approaches to the Middle East and North Africa offer a rich opportunity to bring together postcolonial and Marxist thinking. Scholars in the Middle East and North Africa have long thought with Gramsci, and in the wake of 2011 there is a significant revival in Gramscian perspectives in Middle East Studies.
We aim to build on this growing interest in Gramsci across the globe. We hope to explore, especially through empirically-grounded research, how Gramsci’s work can help us make sense of a moment marked by a significant expansion in resistance and uprising.
The Organizing Committee
Sara Salem, LSE Department of Sociology; Brecht De Smet, Ghent University; John Chalcraft, LSE Department of Government; Nadine Almanasfi, LSE Middle East Centre