Stanford University doctoral student Yasemin Ipek Can, supervised by Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako, will undertake research on public space and youth activism in post-conflict societies. The research will be conducted in Lebanon where there has been a recent valorization of youth (shabaab) activism. She will study the popular and dynamic notion of shabaab in Lebanon both as a social agent that claims control over the public space and as representative of Lebanese identity. Focusing on youth activism offers a unique lens for understanding everyday contestations, anxieties, and anticipations of the future in the context of post-civil war sectarian polarization.
Ipek Can will conduct 12 months of fieldwork in Beirut where she will examine everyday youth social interaction in two multi-sectarian neighborhoods. Her methodology will combine traditional ethnographic methods with insights from linguistic anthropology and social network analysis in order to document the diverse dynamics of interaction among young people. Life history interviews with young residents, participant observation of their family settings, everyday gatherings and conversations, and analysis of their use of social media will be supported with social network analysis. This research also entails semi-structured interviews with state officials, local governors and youth-based NGOs, as well as content analyses of their published materials.
This project will be a pioneering ethnography for theorizing the affective and temporal dimensions of identity and belonging among youth in post-conflict societies. The findings of this research will also increase collaboration among Lebanese scholars, Lebanese government, local youth-based NGOs, transnational organizations focusing on youth, and scholars studying youth, sectarianism, conflict-resolution, everyday publics, affect, temporality and the role of language in everyday social interaction. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN AR-SA In Lebanon, the fragile system of compromises between different sects was severely damaged by the assassination of the late Prime Minister Refik Hariri and the protests that followed (the Cedar Revolution) in 2005, which polarized the country into two hostile political camps. This polarization incited a widespread sense of uncertainty, crisis, and fear over the possibility of returning to a chaotic civil war. The heightened sense of crisis – aggravating sectarian tension and related security anxieties – were deepened over the course of the 2011 Syrian civil war as Syrian refugees flooded into Lebanon, inciting Shia-Sunni skirmishes in various cities, including Beirut. Beyond this continuing sense of threat and the constant risk-evasion it promotes in urban life, Lebanon has for years suffered from an extreme lack of functioning state institutions, which strikingly fail to provide even the most basic infrastructural services like electricity, water, and telecommunications. My research showed that a widespread sense of exhaustion from crisis-ridden everyday life mobilized a range of civil, governmental, and global stakeholders to valorize and promote "the youth" in Lebanon as an agent of social change. Local communities, families, and a series of international humanitarian agencies – being plagued by instability and an imminent threat of war – continuously flood the youth with their competing visions of "social change." I conducted an 18-month ethnographic study in the Msaitbeh region of central Beirut. Most residents were rural migrants seeking opportunities for employment and upward social mobility. Notions of crisis, uncertainty, and social change pervaded the in-depth interviews I conducted with both poor and middle-class informants. My research demonstrated the significant role of aspirations for upward social mobility and emigration among young people as a response to the overwhelming sense of crisis in Beirut. Future-oriented notions like "being positive," "hope," and "dreaming" frame the emergent trajectories of social mobility and networking among strangers in this deeply segregated and conflicted city. A range of strategies associated with dreaming and "hope" are taught and practiced across diverse youth communities, which endorse avoiding discussions of ongoing political crises and disregarding the past and the present. The active imagining of future trajectories becomes a major contour for economic struggles with employment and financial stability, as well as contestations of belonging and identity. These trajectories are disseminated mainly (but not exclusively) through international collaborations of different UN and EU funded local projects, ministries, NGO workshops, and consultancy companies, which produce an expert knowledge on youth. This research also shows that the young people of Beirut, coming from different parts of the country, actively get involved in a variety of kinship, sectarian and cross-sectarian networks for coping with unemployment, chronic infrastructure problems, and the high cost of living. Particularly lower-class and middle-class young people with rural backgrounds widely combine the connectivity granted by their sectarian networks with professional urban networks for increased social standing. Hence, a striking outcome of my research was how professional and relatively meritocratic modern notions like entrepreneurialism, networking, and marketing were interwoven with traditional if not rural notions and patronage structures. These "networks of strength" and being well-connected to powerful individuals (sect leaders, rich families, etc.) to assure mobility and avoid adversity pose a constitutive tension. This tension aids the construction of unique urban-secular professional identities, whereby sectarian and tribal relations almost always tarnish desires for modernity and global cosmopolitanism. While the youth feel indebted to their families for providing them with sectarian/kinship/party networks that facilitate their upward mobility in Beirut, they also view them as debilitating constraints in their lives, hindering their independence – particularly with regard to marriage. The main intellectual merit of this study lies in having unearthed perceptions and practices related to dreams, anxieties, and aspirations about widespread senses of "the future" among young people. In all its multiplicity and richness, "the future" is articulated as an animate phenomenon within everyday practices of being positive and dreaming. My research diversifies existing studies on identity and gender in the Middle East through a focus on everyday aspects of social mobility and socio-economic stratification to uniquely demonstrate how the circulation of ideas, desires, and aspirations in everyday networks constitutes and diversifies class positions. Concerning the broader impacts of this research, my findings contribute substantially to ongoing public discussion of the effects of entrepreneurial practices, design, ideation, and activism, as well as the viability of civil initiatives and workshops in the developing world. Globally orchestrated efforts to promote dreaming by a wide range of grassroots youth initiatives, NGOs, and even governmental bodies currently seek to overcome widespread apathy, disillusionment, and a sense of being stuck. The analyses offered by this research deepen our understanding of crisis and conflict by providing on-the-ground analyses of the everyday struggles of youth in a major global conflict zone.
