Research Topic:

Rights in Revolutionary Times: The Antinomies of Human Rights and the Egyptian Uprising

Supervisors:

Professor Chetan Bhatt (Department of Sociology) and Dr Ayça Çubukçu (Department of Sociology)

Research Interests:

Social and Political Thought, Critical Theory, Human Rights, Middle East Studies, Social Movements, Arab Intellectual History, Sociology of Critique 

Thesis Abstract:

My research examines broad theoretical debates around how human rights are to be conceptualised, and how human rights relate to ideological shifts in thinking about political struggle, critique and utopia. I contrast those theoretical debates to the intellectual, social and legal practices of Egyptian dissidents as they tried to develop a narrative and a praxis oriented towards both human rights and radical change, to see how those local conceptualisations converge or differ from mainstream legal-international frameworks. I use this contrast, then, to critique the limitations of current hegemonic framings of human rights in social and political thought.