Mohammed Bamyeh

Wednesday, 24 October 2018, 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm |
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Anarchy as Order: Civil Society, Responsibility and the Meaning of Freedom after the Arab Revolutions

Mohammed Bamyeh
(University of Pittsburgh / EUME Fellow 2018/19)

Chair: Yasmeen Daher
(University of Montreal)

The Palestinian thinker Mohammed Bamyeh, author of Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity, discusses the philosophy and practice of anarchy as it relates to revolutionary moments in general, and to the Arab world in particular. He talks about the reasons for which people turn away from traditional politics, how political love (aka hope) can constitute new citizens and how certain traditions that existed for a long time in civil society can be understood as seeds for free spaces. The seminar is supposed to be a conversation on authority and its lack, and the meaning of responsibility and freedom.

Mohammed Bamyeh is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and the current editor of International Sociology Reviews (ISR). He has held the Hubert Humphrey chair in International Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the SSRC-MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He has previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, SUNY Buffalo, and the University of Massachusetts. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. His subsequent areas of interest have included processes of comparative cultural change as reflected in Islamic histories, revolutionary processes and social movements, and social theory. He is also a specialist in the sociology of knowledge, especially concerning the role of intellectuals in society and professional knowledge systems in the Arab World. He is the lead author of the Arab Council for Social Sciences’ (ACSS) first report, Social Sciences in the Arab World: Forms of Presence (2015). His other books include Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East (ed., 2012); Anarchy as Order (2009); Of Death and Dominion (2007); The Ends of Globalization (2000); and The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (1999). He has also edited Palestine America (2003); Literature and Revolution (a special issue of the Arab-American journal Mizna, 2012); and co-edited (with Brett Neilson) Drugs in Motion: Toward a Materialist Tracking of Global Mobilities (2009). He has previously been a EUME Fellow in the academic years 2010/11 and 2014/15 and returned as affiliated EUME Fellow in the academic year 2018/19.

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