Ali Kassem
Dr Ali Kassem's research, engagement work, and teaching examine contemporary coloniality's functioning across questions and articulations of power and knowledge. This has included the embodied experiences of anti-Muslim racism within the Arab-majority world, the contemporary transformations in Islamic educational institutions and scholarship across Lebanon and Iran, the dehumanisation of Syrian Refugees across (western) Europe and the Muslim-majority worlds, and the tyrannising urbanisation of lifeworlds in Lebanon. Through these and other projects, he engages key questions of erasure, the fundamentalism of Eurocentric modernity, as well as its resistances and refusals through qualitative, reflexive, and participatory work that centres listening. Transdisciplinary, this works cuts across ethnic and racial studies, sociology of religion, sociology of education, social psychology, migration studies, political economy, and urban studies among other fields and traditions of critical inquiry thinking alongside various anticolonial and decolonial figures including Frantz Fanon, Ali Shariati, and James Baldwin. His work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Globalizations, Contemporary Religion, Contemporary Arab Affairs, Review of Middle East Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, and many other journals as well as magazines, newspapers, and podcast platforms. He obtained his PhD from the School of Law, Politics, and Sociology at the University of Sussex and held teaching appointments at Sussex between 2018-2021. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh and was an early career fellow with the Arab Council for Social Sciences funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and with an affiliation to the Beirut Urban Lab in 2020-2021. He has also previously held research and/or teaching positions at the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, the Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, the Lebanese American University, The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm, and the Free University in Brighton, among others. His book with I.B. Tauris - Bloomsbury Academic is titled Islamophobia and Global Coloniality: the Lived Erasure of Visibly Muslim Women in Lebanon (February 2023). The manuscript offers a critical and timely intervention exploring anti-Muslim racism and its internalisation within Arab-majority and Muslim-majority spaces (re)thinking the formations of race (outside of Euro-America), nationalism, the so-called Middle East, and global Eurocentric modernity. He is editing a second book titled (De)Coloniality and Arabo-Islamicate Worlds (2025) with Bristol University Press.
