Lebanon’s 2015 Garbage Crisis & You Stink Movement

I began my first year of under-graduate studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2012, during a pivotal moment marked by the unfolding and diffusion of the Arab Uprisings across the region and beyond. Having been part of movements in Lebanon and witnessed the many challenges they faced, I developed a deep interest in studying social movements and collective action. Guiding my early research are, thus, fundamental questions that have captivated both activists and scholars alike, since the eruption of the Arab uprisings and their eventual metamorphosis into morbidity. These questions are not only relevant to the Arab context but constitute a global dilemma for social movements worldwide. In this third strand of my research, I examined the challenges facing ‘new’ political actors and contemporary movements in their attempts to advance ‘alternative’ forms of political organization. My MA research at AUB analyzed these challenges in relation to the uncontested hegemony of neoliberalism and its impacts on mobilization structures and repertoires as well as perceptions of contentious politics and social change in the Arab world. Rather than fostering durable, representative political structures, the multiplication of new media-savvy ‘civil society’ organizations in Lebanon increasingly reflects neoliberal tendencies toward fragmentation and individualization, displacing contentious politics with consensual and depoliticized expressive politics. This research culminated in two articles published in Critical Sociology (2019, 2020), the first of which receiving the Erik Olin Wright Award for Best Article by a Junior Scholar (2020). This work was presented at multiple academic and activist venues, including the Lebanese Sociological Association conference (Beirut, 2018), the Alternative Futures & Popular Protests Conference (Manchester, UK, 2019) and Dammeh co-operative (Beirut, 2018).