I was invited to co-organize a graduate workshop for the Lebanon Unsettled project, which documents the 2019 Lebanon Protests. The research project is a collaboration between Dr Deen Sharp (LSE) and Dr May Farhat (previously USEK, now LAU). I convened the one-day workshop Intimate Legacies: Tracing the Spatiality of Actors during the 2019 Lebanon Protests, and contributed to developing the programme, recruiting participants, and organising field trips.
The workshop invited participants to trace their spatial-autobiographical journey during the 2019 Lebanon Protest. This included tracing how they found out about the protest; how they first decided to go to the streets; how they negotiated their complex social legacies and ties (kinship, sect, institutions, and technology); and how they appropriated urban space as part of networks (human, nonhumans, environment, systems, and attachments). The participants remarked on how it felt to be part of the uprising, what they did to protest and how different it was from media representations.
>>> Read Blog I: Lebanon Unsettled
>>> Read Blog II: Lebanon (Still) Unsettled
>>> Visit the Lebanon Unsettled website
>>> Download the “Intimate Legacies” syllabus
Participants were asked to look for and scrutinise relational socio-political practices in an actor’s multiple paths within existing/new networks and sturdy/fluid alliances, instead of the common and overused Social and Political explanations – with capital S and P. The aim was to trace how this actor-network’s sociopolitical practice operates to disentangle from old “attachments” and entangle into new ones (Gomart and Hennion 1999; Latour 1999; Hennion 2017), including the degrees of difficulty for doing so.
The outcome was a set of relational-intimate-spatio-temporal-socio-political mappings that reflected on interrupted flows, compressed time, bodily traumas, multiple realities, sturdy/fluid alliances, and emergent spatial practices.
