Arab Uprisings

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course considers the last two decades of uprisings, protests, and revolutions across the Middle East in historical as well as comparative perspective. From Tunisia to Yemen, the region’s history is full of examples of people who have mobilized against social, economic, and political injustice in the hopes of building a better future. In this course, students will learn to situate uprisings in their historical trajectories, studying regional, national, and global contexts, as well as the everyday lived experiences of ordinary people. What possesses people to do the desperate acts that they undertake in times of political hope, duress, and upheaval? How are political symbols born and remade? How do protests and protesters give meaning to spaces, to their bodies, and define agency and resistance? Students will examine changing roles and definitions of the 'state' and the 'people', including women, peasants, laborers, the military, and youth. This course will also delve into the place of imagination in protest, the generative role that protests play in terms of world-building, cultural and artistic production, as well as the limitations and hopefulness they bring to the fore.