BIO

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and aim to defend in May 2026. As a global/transnational sociologist, my work contributes broadly to debates across political sociology, social movement theories, political economy, feminist economics and critical development studies. My research traces an ethnography of everyday crisis attentive to the politics of class and class subjectivities in Lebanon.

Situated in the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastating 2019 financial and economic collapse, my doctoral research theorizes the politics of class through close ethnographic attention to middle-class subjectivities and everyday life. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how Lebanon's middle class—both a product and a cornerstone of the now-defunct political economic model—renegotiate identities, recover meaning, and reconstruct attachments amidst dramatic collapse and class dislocation. While the material implications of this crisis have gained increased attention, much less attention has been given to the impacts of this collapse on class subjectivities, particularly the subjectivities of members of the middle classes, once a cornerstone of the model’s fraught (in)/stability. My research examines the kinds of agentive tactics and coping mechanisms that emerge under conditions of class dislocation and dramatic collapse, demonstrating the impacts of these adaptive strategies on political subjectivities, relationship to the state, and the capacity of political economic regimes to reproduce themselves—through the minutiae of everyday practices within which people maneuver and adapt. The erosion of class locations is not an isolated or bounded phenomena but rather speaks to the global crisis of capitalism.

My broader research agenda interrogates the interplay between crisis, political subjectivity, and the reproduction of power under contemporary capitalism (see research portfolio). Across these projects, I develop an ethnographic and relational critique of neoliberalism that foregrounds the tension between crisis and consent, dispossession and social struggles. These projects benefited from numerous intellectual engagements in international academic conferences, culminated in several peer-reviewed journal articles, and received prestigious awards (see CV and publications).