Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds & Bounded Futures in Lebanon | Book Talk with Yasemin İpek

This event originally planned for February 9 will now take place on April 29.

Crisiswork presents a story of Lebanon through the lens of activist lifeworlds, showing how, amid crisis, both political structures and everyday life become a terrain of generative possibility. Through an ethnographic investigation into the relationship between crisis and political imagination, Yasemin İpek examines activism as an open-ended process, looking at the diversity of experiences that leads to ambivalent political engagements. She follows a range of self-identified activists—including unemployed NGO volunteers, middle-class consultants, and leftist entrepreneurs—as their crisiswork, and response to contradictory pressures, leads them to new ways of being and acting. Crisiswork demonstrates how class-based and other inequalities on local and global scales affect the lived realities and political imaginations of activists. It provides an innovative analytical framework for understanding the complex political and social struggles against crises in the global South.

Yasemin İpek is an Assistant Professor in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from Stanford University and a second doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. Her book Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2025) explicates the relationship between crisis and political imagination by examining the popularization of activism in contemporary Lebanon. For her second book-length research project, she is studying transnational humanitarianism in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), The Muslim World, and Turkish Studies.