I work on history and politics ‘from below’. I am interested in the many ways in which subordinated groups challenge social domination and build alternatives. Most of my research has been on the Middle East and North Africa, while my more recent work is on theories of popular mobilization and transnationalism in many parts of the world. My studies draw very much on the transdisciplinary traditions of research and engagement initiated by the intellectual and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. I trained as an historian, but the aim is to connect history with politics and philosophy. My early work on the social history of pre-1914 Egypt puzzles over questions of labour ‘outside the factory gates’, and uneven, peripheral capitalism. After this book, I started increasingly to think in terms of the rich possibilities afforded by the living Gramscian tradition. I co-edited a volume on hegemony and counterhegemony in the colony and postcolony. I then addressed questions of labour migration, writing an historical ethnography about migrant workers in Lebanon and Syria since the 1960s, while also publishing on migration politics and transnationalism in the Arabian peninsula. I then wrote a survey history of popular politics, contentious mobilization, and hegemonic contestation in the whole region from the eighteenth century to the revolutionary uprisings of the 2010s. I have also researched and published on transnational activism for Palestinian rights. My next major publication puts forward a Gramscian theory of popular mobilization.
