Activism, Contestation, and Criticism in Lebanon

Ghida Frangieh is a lawyer and legal researcher, and a member of the Legal Agenda and the Pro-Bono Lawyers’ Committee for the Defense of Protesters. She holds an MA in international human rights law from the University of Aix-Marseille, France. She previously worked for Frontiers Ruwad Association as a legal advisor on the protection of refugees and stateless persons.

Leen Hashim is a feminist writer, researcher, and translator living in Beirut. She holds a BA in broadcasting and communications from the Lebanese University, and an MA in gender studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work spans a variety of fields, including feminist and queer organizing, and research into issues related to gender and sexuality.

Roger Outa is a writer and experimenter based in Beirut. His collection of poems, City Stripped of Memory, was published in 2008. In 2012, he presented Because I Worry about My Death, a visual collage, at the French Cultural Center. In 2014, he presented a reading performance entitled The Unease of Michel Samaha: An Intervention in a Court Case in collaboration with Chaza Charafeddine. Outa currently writes for the online newspaper Al-Modon.

Khaled Saghieh began his career as a journalist with the newspaper As-Safir, where he initiated the youth supplement “Al Shabab.” He then moved to Al-Akhbar during its foundational years and was its senior editor until 2011. Saghieh worked as broadcast editor at LBC International until 2015. He obtained his BA in computer science and communications from the American University of Beirut, but is not an engineer. Saghieh went on to complete his MA in economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, but is not an economist, either.

Samer Frangie is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, where he teaches courses on Arab politics and political thought, and social and political theory. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Aside from his academic work, he is a frequent contributor to the pan-Arab daily newspaper, al-Hayat. This panel takes the recent protests triggered by the “trash crisis” as its starting point in order to examine the transformation of political activism and modalities of contestation. The panel will examine forms of interventions, the language of contestation, and the relation with the existing political forces. Furthermore, the panel seeks to situate the current protest within its regional context, in relation to the “Arab revolutions” and the crisis-ridden Lebanese polity; it also seeks to question how these “peripheral” interventions can have an effect on the broader political scene and how they can intervene in political systems increasingly dominated by violent and sectarian ideologies.