Author Meets Critics: Jillian Schwedler’s "Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel will examine Jillian Schwedler’s 2022 book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent. In it, Schwedler argues that protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. She considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan.

Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan’s past, present, and future.

The panelists who will discuss Schwedler’s book are diverse in terms of disciplinary focus, gender, race, and career stage. They bring diverse perspectives in terms of their expertise as scholars of protests, social movements, race and ethnic studies, postcoloniality, and democratic studies. In addition, they bring insights from different regions of the world.

Sub Unit

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Chair

• Amel F. Ahmed University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Presenters

• Jillian M. Schwedler Hunter College

• Lisa Wedeen University of Chicago

• Lester Kenyatta Spence Johns Hopkins University

• Sarah E. Parkinson Johns Hopkins University

• Zachariah Cherian Mampilly Baruch College, CUNY