In 2011, Atef Said travelled to Tahrir Square, where he would spend the next years tracing the developing revolution and trying to make sense of it, both as a participant but also as a sociologist interested in the historical dimensions of political possibilities. At the time, Said was pursuing his doctoral studies in the United States, having worked previously as a human rights attorney in Egypt. These different positions informed Said’s subsequent research which sought to study the repertoires of revolution in Tahrir Square. Straddling these multiple roles and in response to the counterrevolution that took hold in Egypt in 2013, Said has recently published Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2024). Said is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
LSE Human Rights will hold a discussion and Q and A with Said on the methodology he developed to research revolution. We invite staff and research students in the Department of Sociology and at LSE to participate in the discussion.
Please register for this event. We ask attendees to read ‘Appendix 2: A Note on Positionality’ and ‘Appendix 3: Notes on Methods, or How I Conducted an Historical Ethnography of a Revolution’ from Said’s book. Revolution Squared is available at the library.