CHR Book Launch- "Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon" by Yasemin İpek
in conversation with Hatim El-Hibri and Jessica Greenberg
Monday, November 10, 2025 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM EST
Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom
Please join us for a CHR Book launch to discuss Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon by Yasemin İpek.
About the book: The world's attention has often turned to Lebanon in moments of crisis, including, recently, during the Beirut Port Explosion in 2020 and the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Less told is the story of how such major events, and other predicaments from Lebanon's long history, have mobilized a thriving network of activists whose lived experiences of multiple crises have shaped their politics, belonging, and vision of Lebanon's future. Crisiswork presents a story of Lebanon through the lens of activist lifeworlds, showing how, amid crisis, both political structures and everyday life become a terrain of generative possibility.
Through an ethnographic investigation into the relationship between crisis and political imagination, Yasemin İpek examines activism as an open-ended process, looking at the diversity of experiences that leads to ambivalent political engagements. She follows a range of self-identified activists—including unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class consultants, and leftist entrepreneurs—as their crisiswork, and response to contradictory pressures, leads them to new ways of being and acting. Crisiswork demonstrates how class-based and other inequalities on local and global scales affect the lived realities and political imaginations of activists. It provides an innovative analytical framework for understanding the complex political and social struggles against crises in the global South.
Co-sponsored by the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies
Author and discussants:
Yasemin İpek is an Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from Stanford University and a second doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. Her book Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2025) explicates the relationship between crisis and political imagination by examining the popularization of activism in contemporary Lebanon. For her second book-length research project, she is studying transnational Muslim humanitarianism in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Jessica Greenberg is a professor of anthropologyy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work bridges political, legal and linguistic anthropology and is motivated by a long-standing interest in the everyday life of social movements, as well as the hopes and disappointments that have animated democratic political activism after the Cold War. Her most recent book is Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law and the European Court of Human Rights (Stanford 2025).
Hatim El-Hibri is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at George Mason University, where he is also affiliated with the program in Middle East and Islamic Studies. His academic interests are in global media studies, infrastructure studies, visual culture studies, urban studies, and media theory and history, with a focus on the Arab world and Middle East. His first book is Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Streaming the Crisis.
