Dr Mai Taha

Dr Mai Taha

Assistant Professor in Human Rights

Department of Sociology

Room No
STC.S206
Languages
Arabic, English
Key Expertise
Human Rights, International Law, Marxism, Labour, Feminism, Colonialism

About me

Dr Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights at the Department of Sociology. Mai has written on international law and empire, human rights, labour movements, class and gender relations, and care work and social reproduction. She is influenced by critical theory, socio-legal studies, law and Marxism, Marxist feminism, and post-colonial thought. Using film, literature, and oral history narratives, Mai is currently working on questions relating to labour, the home, and revolutionary subjectivity. 

Before joining LSE, she was a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London, and previously, an Assistant Professor in International Human Rights Law and Justice at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Mai was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard University. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto.

Currently, Mai is working on two projects that relate to the question of revolutionary subjectivity. The first is a socio-legal history of refusal and revolt in Mandate Palestine, focusing on the home as a site of resistance and a space from which an alternative anti-colonial imaginary was assembled and sustained. The projects centres Palestinian women as creative agents who radically reimagined the Arab home as a space of resistance and repurposed their labour of social reproduction as struggle.

The second is on an expansive conception of social reproduction, one that addresses the broad reach of capitalism today from the workplace to the home and the city.

Mai also co-directs Archive Stories with Sara Salem.

Selected Writings

Taha, M. 2023. Thinking Through the Home: Work, Rent, and the Reproduction of Society. Social Research: an International Quarterly, 90 (4). pp.837-858.

Taha, M. 2023. History, Contestation, and the Double: On Teaching Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law. University of Toronto Law Journal. (Forthcoming)

Salem, S. and Taha, M., 2023. On Alienation and Bitterness: Thinking Through Dhat with Latifa al-Zayyat. Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research

Taha, M. 2023. Human Rights and Communist Internationalism: On Inji Aflatoun and the Surrealists, in Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces, Immi Tallgren, ed. Oxford University Press.

Taha, M. 2022. The Comic and the Absurd: On Colonial Law in Revolutionary Palestine. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 59 (1), pp. 189-223.

Taha, M. 2021. Law, Class Struggle and Nervous Breakdowns, in Anne Orford, Kathryn Greenman, Anna Saunders and Ntina Tzouvala (eds.), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917. Cambridge University Press.

Taha, M. 2019. From Cairo to Jerusalem: Law, Labour, Time and Catastrophe. Law and Critique, 30 (3), pp. 243-264.

Salem, S. and Taha, M., 2019. Social Reproduction and Empire in an Egyptian Century. Radical Philosophy.

Taha, M. 2019. Drinking Water by the Sea: Real and Unreal Property in the Mixed Courts of Egypt, in Daniel S. Margolies, Umut Özsu, Maïa Pal and Ntina Tzouvala, Standards and Sovereigns: Legal Histories of Extraterritoriality. Routledge.

Taha, M. 2017. Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work in Egypt: law and the woman between the factory and the ‘social factory’, in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures Cambridge University Press.

Taha, M. 2016. Reading Class in International Law: The Labour Question in Interwar Egypt’ Social and Legal Studies: An International Journal, 25 (5).

Taha, M. 2014. The Egyptian Revolution in and Out of the Juridical Space: An Inquiry into Labour Law and the Workers’ Movement in Egypt. International Journal of Law in Context, 10, (2).

Taha, M. 2014. The Mystic Wand of Participation: An Appraisal of Mark Mazower’s No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. German Law Journal, 12 (7).

Other Publications

Nassar, A., Madbouly, M., Ezzat, A., Abazeed A., Abdelrahman, N., Agha, M., El Khachab, C., Elwakil, A., Mourad, L., and Taha, M. 2023. Objects, memories, and storytelling: experiments in narrating ideas of home. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action.

Taha, M. 2023. The People of the Archive: On the Oral History Tradition of Palestine. Archive Stories.

Taha, M. 2021. Review of Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and

the Histories of International Law. European Journal of International Law, 32 (3).

Taha, M. 2020. Reflections on Marxism and Law. Legal Form.

Taha, M. 2019. Decolonization in International Law. Oxford Bibliographies in International Law.

Taha, M. 2016. Histories of International Labour Governmentality. Social and Legal Studies Blog, November.

Expertise Details

Human Rights; International Law; Marxism; Labour; Social Reproduction; Feminism; Colonialism