Biographies
YASAR ADANALI is an Istanbul-based urbanist, researcher and lecturer. He is the co-founder and director of Center for Spatial Justice Beyond Istanbul (beyond-istanbul.org). Yaşar has a BA on social and political sciences from Sabanci University (Istanbul) and a master’s degree on development and planning from DPU (London). His PhD research in Habitat Unit (TU Berlin) is on relations of spatial production and democratization processes in Istanbul. Yaşar worked as a development specialist with urban poor communities in the Dominican Republic; and for Stuttgart University on refugee camp improvement projects. He teaches a participatory planning course at TU Darmstadt as a visiting lecturer since 2009. Yaşar is a voluntary member of Düzce Hope Studio and One Hope Association (Istanbul).
FARAH AL-NAKIB is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait. She obtained her PhD (2011) and MA (2006) in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her research primarily focuses on the urban history of Kuwait City before and after oil, on which she has written her first book, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford University Press, 2016). Her articles have been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, City, Built Environment, among other peer reviewed journals, and in various edited volumes. Her current research focuses on collective memory and forgetting in relation to modernity in Kuwait, and on the 1990-91 Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Al-Nakib was a Carnegie Centennial Fellow at American University in Washington, DC in spring 2016, and a visiting scholar at the George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies in 2014. She is also co-editor of the Cities Page on jadaliyya.com.
ASEF BAYAT is the Catherine & Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, and teaches Sociology and the Middle East at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change, to religion and politics, Islam and the modern world, and urban space and politics. His recent books include Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with Linda Herrera) (Oxford University Press, 2010); Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University Press, 2013); Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2013. 2nd edition). His forthcoming book is Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017).
NADINE BEKDACHE is a practicing designer and urbanist. Her research focuses on socio-spatial phenomena through multidisciplinary methods. She has employed mapping and film as processes of investigation and representation in several research projects. Those include mapping security in Beirut, mapping land ownership along Beirut’s coast, housing narratives, practices in public spaces, as well as advocacy maps.
She is the author of “Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon’s Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles”. As part of her research on the implications of rent control on urban change and the processes of eviction in Beirut, she co-directed “Beyhum Street: Mapping Place Narratives”. She is also a graphic design instructor at the Lebanese University.
Bekdache co-founded Public Works Studio with Abir Saksouk in 2012, a research and design collective that engages critically and creatively in a number of urban and public issues in Lebanon. The studio initiates action-oriented applied research on the city, the most recent being the communal making of informal football fields in Beirut, housing rights from a neighborhood perspective, and how the legislative environment shapes the urban development of Lebanese cities.
JULIE-ANNE BOUDREAU is a Doctor of Urban Planning from the School of Public Policy and Social Research of the University of California at Los Angeles. Professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre Urbanisation Culture Société (INRS-UCS) in Montreal, she held the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005-2015. She is currently Invited Professor at the Instituto de Geografia of the Universidad nacional autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). She was Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) from 2010-2015. She founded and directs the multimedia Laboratory Ville et ESPAces politiques (VESPA). Her work focuses on the relationship between political mobilisation, urbanisation and state restructuring processes. Her various projects in Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, Paris, Brussels, Mexico City and Hanoi interrogate this relationship from the angle of feelings of insecurity and the experience of mobility and displacement. She currently lives in Mexico City and works with migrants, domestic workers, motobikers, street vendors, and youth, to explore how the city influences the formation of political subjectivities and citizenship practices. Her most recent book is entitled Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State (Polity Press, 2017). She is currently preparing an ethnographic book entitled The Aesthetics of Political Action: Youth Urban Worlds in Montreal, to be published in 2018 by McGill-Queens’ University Press.
THANASSIS CAMBANIS is an author, journalist and fellow at The Century Foundation, who specializes in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. He is co-director of TCF’s “Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings” and editor of a forthcoming volume of research on Arab political experiments in an era of resurgent authoritarianism. His most recent book, Once upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story (Simon and Schuster: 2015), chronicles Egyptian efforts to create a new political order. His first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions, was published in 2010. He writes “The Internationalist” column for The Boston Globe Ideas, and regularly contributes to The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and The New York Times. He has taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He lives in Beirut. See more of his writing at thanassiscambanis.com. Twitter: @tcambanis.
DIMITRI DALAKOGLU is Professor at the Vrije University Amsterdam where he holds the Chair in Social Anthropology. He is studying ethnographically infrastructures and (post)socialist urban spaces in the Balkans since 2004, and since 2009 he is studying the financial crisis and urban infrastructures in Athens. His books include Greek Crisis (2017), the Road (2016), Crisis-scapes (2014), Revolt and Crisis in Greece (2011). He was Visiting Fellow in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center and Visiting Fellow in Material Culture at UCL. He is disciplinary editor for Anthropology in the Journal City.
ANNA DOMARADZKA is a sociologist, Assistant Professor and Associate Director for Research at Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw. Senior Fulbright Researcher at the Institute for Social Research at University of Michigan in 2011-2012, Visiting Professor at INCAE Business School (Costa Rica) in 2016 and San Diego State University (USA) in 2017. Currently serving as a board member of: International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), ISA RC48 (Social movements and Collective action) and editorial board of Voluntas journal.
Her main research interests concern the issues of civil society organizations, social movements and local activism in urban context. She specializes in intersectional and international comparative research in the areas of urban studies and gender sociology, works in several international projects concerning urban development, civil society and welfare state issues. At the moment her main research focus is on neighborhood associations, “right to the city” movement and social entrepreneurship in comparative perspective. Since 2015 she’s involved in the creation of the Warsaw Development Strategy 2030 as an expert on social issues. Her recent grant financed by Polish National Science Center “City revival – from urban planning to grassroots initiatives” concerns the issues of quality of life in revitalized areas, neighborhood support networks, and possible impact of grassroots activism on urban planning processes.
SORAYA EL-KAHLAOUI Currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, Soraya’s research aims to analyze forms of reclaiming public spaces in the context of a process of democratization spawned in Morocco since 2011. More specifically, her research consists of creating a frame of political analysis of the practices of space appropriation and/or resistances led by inhabitants in the situation of fighting for occupation rights.
MONA FAWAZ is Associate Professor in Urban Studies and Planning and the Coordinator of the graduate programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is also the program coordinator of the Social Justice and the City program, a platform based at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at AUB which aims to formulate an agenda for research, mobilization and policy advocacy that establishes a partnership between scholars, policy-makers, and activists working towards more inclusive cities in Lebanon. Fawaz was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University during the 2014/15 academic year. Mona’s scholarly interests stem from the imperative of making cities more inclusive, particularly from the perspective of enabling low-income dwellers to take part in shaping their cities. Her work spans across urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory and pedagogy. She is the author of over 40 scholarly articles, book sections, and reports in Arabic, French and English and has edited several collections of essays on these issues.
Aside from these scholarly interests, Mona has been tightly involved in Beirut’s ongoing transformations by publishing in the local press and speaking in numerous local venues where she has advocated for upgrading informal settlements, protecting the urban commons, improving urban livability, adopting more inclusive planning standards, and more generally, defending the right to the city for the urban majorities.
SOPHIE GONICK is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at NYU. Committed to interdisciplinary methods of inquiry, she is interested in race and gender, property regimes, and activism across Southern Europe and Latin America. Her recent research examines mortgage lending and financialization, immigrant activism, and contemporary urban mobilizations in Spain. She has also written about squatting and urban informality in Madrid, including the article ‘Interrogating Madrid’s Slum of Shame: Urban Expansion, Race, and Placed-Based Activism in the Cañada Real Galiana,’ in Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. She has published in top planning and geography journals, including Society and Space and IJURR: International Journal for Urban and Regional Research. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled City of Property, City of Protest: Madrid, 1939-2014. While at NYU she will play an active role in developing urban humanities across the College of Arts and Sciences and the University. Prior to joining SCA, Dr. Gonick was Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. At Berkeley, she served as the coordinator for the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). She received the 2016 Anthony Sutcliffe Memorial Award for best dissertation, awarded biennially from the International Planning History Society.
MONA HARB is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut. She received her PhD in Political Science in 2005 from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Aix-en-Provence (France). She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013—winner of the 2015 BKFS first prize, with Lara Deeb), and co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015, with Sami Atallah). Her ongoing research investigates policy mobilities and city strategies, as well as youth mobilization and exclusion. Harb is the recipient of grants from the LSE, EU-FP7, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, and the Middle-East Awards. She serves on the editorial boards of IJURR and CSSAME, and is a trustee of the Arab Council for Social Sciences. She is the founder and co-editor of the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine. She has provided professional advice on urban development issues for many international organizations (ESCWA, WB, EU, UNDP).
KAREEM IBRAHIM is an architect and planner, and graduated from Cairo University in 1995. In 1997, he worked on the UNDP’s Historic Cairo Rehabilitation Project. He has also worked for Aga Khan Cultural Services – Egypt between 1997 and 2010 as the Built Environment Coordinator of the Darb al-Ahmar Revitalization Project, one of Cairo’s most ambitious urban revitalization programs. In 2009, he co-founded Takween Integrated Community Development and has been working on a range of issues including sustainable architecture, participatory planning, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and urban revitalization throughout Egypt with a number of local and international organizations. He is also the Co-Leader of TADAMUN (The Cairo Urban Solidarity Initiative) aiming at encouraging citizens to claim their Right to the City and its democratic management.
TOLGA ISLAM is Associate Professor in the Urban Planning Department of Yildiz Technical University. As a researcher, he has been working on gentrification and urban transformation for the past 10 years, mainly focusing on the gentrification processes taking place in Istanbul. He has co-edited the book “Istanbul’da Soylulaştırma” [Gentrification in Istanbul] and written several articles on classical and state-led gentrification processes in Istanbul. For more, please visit his website at http://www.tolgaislam.com
AZAM KHATAM is a research associate at The City Institute at York University. She received her PhD in urban environment from York University and her BA and MA in social science from Tehran University. She has worked as a professional sociologist and urban planner before she started her PhD at York. Her research focuses on urbanism in the Middle East, local governance, housing and urban movements. She specializes on Iran. Her PhD research is a social history of Tehran’s urban reforms under Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic. Her recent publications include: The Space Reloaded: Publics and Politics on Enqelab Street in Tehran, in Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta’s (eds.) Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings, Beyond the Square. New York: UR Terreform; Decentralization and ambiguities of local politics in Tehran. Co-authored by Arang Keshavarzian. Middle East Institute, Governing Megacities in MENA and Asia 2016. http://www.mei.edu/content/map/governing-megacities-mena-and-asia.
GULCIN LELANDAIS is a permanent research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2012 and currently working at the research centre of Cities, Territories, Environment and Society (CITERES). Formerly, she was Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Warwick (2010-2012) and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (2009). She recently published « Gezi Protests and Beyond. Urban Resistance under Neoliberal Urbanism in Turkey », in Thörn H., Mayer M., Urban Uprisings: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanism in Europe, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; « Le quartier comme espace de résistance et de politisation. La Vallée de Dikmen à Ankara face à un projet de transformation urbaine », Cultures & Conflits, n°101, vol.1, 2016.
ISIDORO LóPEZ is currently Member of Parliament in the Madrid Regional Parliament for Podemos. López is trained as a sociologist and he worked as a researcher in the Spanish Observatory for Sustainability since its establishment in 2005 and until its closure in 2012. He was also a member of the militant researchers collective Observatorio Metropolitano of Madrid. He has authored several articles including, with Emmanuel Rodriguez, “Fin de Ciclo: financiarización, territorio y sociedad de propietarios en la onda larga del capitalismo hispano” (2010) and also with Emmanuel Rodriguez “The Spanish Model” in the New Left Review (2011).
KEISHA-KHAN Y. PERRY is currently an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her research focuses on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her most recent work, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (fall 2013, Minnesota Press), is an ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities, specifically an examination of black women’s participation and leadership in neighborhood associations, and the re-interpretations of racial and gender identities in urban spaces. Winner of the National Women’s Studies Association 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award, this book includes an analysis of the relationship between environmental justice movements and land and housing rights struggles in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador. She is currently writing her second book, Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice while carrying out the research for two other book projects: The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas and Evictions and Convictions: The Gendered Racial Logic of Black Dispossession in New York City.
RICHARD PITHOUSE is an Associate Professor at the Unit for the Humanities (UHURU) at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he is the senior researcher and a Visiting Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Pithouse is a widely published academic. His recent academic work focuses on urban studies, popular struggles and political theory – with a particular focus on Frantz Fanon. He is also a regular contributor to the public sphere and a newspaper columnist. His journalism has included work on music and poetry as well as politics. A collection of his essays, Writing the Decline, was published last year.
DENNIS RODGERS is Professor of International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). A social anthropologist by training, his research focuses broadly on issues relating to the political economy of conflict and violence in cities in Latin America (Nicaragua, Argentina) and South Asia (India). Much of his work focuses on the study of youth gangs – he has been conducting longitudinal ethnographic research on a Nicaraguan gang since 1996 – but he has also worked on the topics of urban inequality, the politics of socio-spatial segregation, participatory governance processes, as well as on the epistemology of development knowledge in fiction and film. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Dennis was Professor of Urban Social and Political Research at the University of Glasgow, Senior Research Fellow in the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI) at the University of Manchester, and Lecturer in Urban Development and Development Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was also member of a Nicaraguan youth gang for a year, as well as manager of a market stall selling rice and beans in a Managua market for six months. His most recent book is the edited volume “Global Gangs” (with Jennifer Hazen, University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
ANANYA ROY is Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. Ananya’s scholarship has focused on urban transformations in the Global South as well as on new regimes of global financialization. Her authored and co-edited books include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty; Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia; Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global; Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development; Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South; and Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Her most recent research is concerned with the urban land question. Thinking across multiple sites, from Chicago and Los Angeles, to South Africa and India, she traces the imaginations and practices of property and personhood that are at stake both in programs of government and the anti-eviction politics of poor people’s movements.
NIZAR SAGHIEH is a leading lawyer, legal researcher and human rights activist. His primary focus includes the independence of the judiciary in Lebanon, the penal code, memory of war, social justice, and rights of the legally marginalized. In addition to his wide legal consulting portfolio, Saghieh is the founding member of the Legal Agenda and its executive director since 2011, a platform that monitors and analyses law and public policy in Lebanon and the Arab Region.
YAHIA SHAWKAT trained as an architect, and over the last nine years Yahia’s work has focused more and more on the confluence of social justice and the built environment since founding the blog ShadowMinistryOfHousing.org in 2008. In 2012 he took a step out of the virtual world and produced the infographic book; Social Justice and the Built environment | A Map of Egypt, and the Right to Housing Initiative documentaries.
As housing rights officer at EIPR between 2013 and 2015 he focused on commodification-based eviction, the deadly building collapse phenomenon and produced a series of housing policy notes on the exclusionary social housing program.
Yahia co-founded the research studio 10 Tooba in 2014 with Omnia Khalil and Ahmed Zaazaa, where he has developed the Built Environment Observatory, an online portal of open knowledge busting myths on urban planning, scrutinizing state spending and advocating equitable housing policies. Yahia has also produced the Built Environment Deprivation Index (BEDI), measuring deprivation form basics such as affordability, durability and secure tenure across Egypt.
Yahia has consulted on housing and built environment policy for the watchdog BIC, as well as UN-Habitat and UNHCR. He has also contributed to Mada Masr, Open Democracy, MEI, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and others.
JAD TABET (AUB, BArch 1969) is an architect and planner working between Beirut (Lebanon) and Paris (France). His practice extends over several dimensions of design and research, including the investigation, preservation, revitalization, and/or rehabilitation of historical urban landscapes and traditional urban fabrics, the design of public spaces, development strategies for sustainable community growth, social housing, and public facilities. Among his projects is an urban renewal project in Rueil Malmaison (won the golden award for sustainable development in the Ile de France region, 2013) and several projects across the Arab world developed in association with Habib Debs, such as the Rehabilitation and Revitalization of the Historic city of Tripoli, Lebanon and the Master Plan for the protection and revitalization of the historic center of Tripoli (Libya).
Tabet is the author of several academic publications on war and reconstruction, on the relationship between heritage and modernity, and numerous op-eds and positions advocating for the protection of urban heritage and shared spaces in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Libya. As a widely recognized advocate of heritage preservation, Tabet is member of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and of the Steering Committee for the UNESCO Program on the Heritage of architectural and urban modernities in the Arab world. He is also the former Director of the International Union of Architects (UIA) Program for the Reconstruction of war-torn cities (1996- 2000).
Tabet has taught in Lebanon (American University of Beirut, Lebanese University) and France (School of Architecture of Paris-Belleville). He also serves as distinguished Faculty at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA- Sciences Po Paris).
Tabet’s exceptional practice in the field has earned him numerous awards. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in Architecture (2003) from the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture- American University of Beirut and the recipient of the Medal of the French Académie d’Architecture and the National Council of French Architects (2014).
ARAM YERETZIAN is an architect with a Bachelor of Architecture from the AUB (1989), and a Master of Science in Architecture degree “Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies” from the University of East London in 2004 (joint program with the Center for Alternative Technology, Wales).
Following work with Cabinets d’Architectes L’Arch in France, on architectural and urban planning projects, he co-founded (in 1999) Prime Design Architects, a professional practice that focuses on research, design and supervision of sustainable architectural design and master-planning projects of various scales.
Since 2015, Aram holds a joint position for climate responsive buildings at the Departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering at AUB. Aram is a member of the Sustainability and Energy committee at the Order of Engineers and Architects in Beirut. He is a founding member of the Lebanon Green Building Council and served as president from 2012 to 2014.
Finally, Aram lectures in conferences that address sustainability issues, serves as a jury member in several universities, and represents the Ministry of Environment in issues related to the environmental aspects of buildings.
SAMI ZEMNI is Professor in political and social sciences at the Center for Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University (Belgium) where he coordinates and leads the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG). His area of expertise is politics within the Middle East and North Africa region, with special reference to political Islam. He focuses mainly on developments in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and democratization in the Arab world, as well as conflict in the Arab world. He has also written on issues of migration, integration, racism and Islamophobia. Sami Zemni was a former Francqui Research Chair holder (2012-2015) and has currently a Baillet-Latour Chair on ‘challenges of contemporary Islam’.