A Kassem
Biographic Data
| ID | 44286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Kassem |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Kassem |
| SIGNATURE | KASSEM A |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6527-2304 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Toward a Decolonial Muslim Queerness
Informed by extensive fieldwork within Hawzas in Lebanon – traditional Shia institution training scholars and Imams – this paper thinks alongside three feminine queer Muslim cis men within this Islamic space. Focusing on the body, emotionality, and sexuality, the analysis explores how they experience the Hawza legitimizing and enabling key aspects of their feminine queer dwelling. Crucially, they do not articulate this queer enablement and the en…
Complex Integrated Necropolitics
On Teaching Sociology ‘Decolonially’ in Singapore
This article explores the possibilities and challenges of teaching sociology ‘decolonially’ at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. Drawing on the classroom as a site of knowledge, it highlights how students’ diverse lived experiences and epistemic positionalities facilitate the deconstruction of foundational Eurocentric categories including race, religion and modernity. However, hierarchical learning models, competitive educati…
Queer Life and The Muslim Mainstream
Queer Muslims exist. Yet they often dwell across margins of both the Islamic and the queer as they occupy positions deemed incommensurable. Through interpretive qualitative research with Shia Muslim hawzas - the "traditional" institutions authoring contemporary Shiism-and its scholars and teachers, this article explores the Islamic possibility of queer-embracing Islam. Identifying and analyzing the potentiality(ies) of both a queer-affirming and …
Knowledge Production in the “Arab-Majority” World and Unlearning in the Field
This paper presents and autoethnographically analyzes three key sites in which the author—a Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim man”—failed to interpellate the lifeworlds of Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim” female participants during a research project in Lebanon: the public-private divide, gender, and the autonomous subject. Specifically, the article identifies key forces that produce this failure, including education, presence in the Westernized university, Westerni…
Village-ness , discrimination, and urban modernity
Based on qualitative phenomenological research alongside village dwellers in Lebanon, this article identifies village-ness – an experience of being labelled as ‘non-urban’ with an upbringing and habitus considered to be ‘of the village’ – as difference and lack. I accordingly argue for the recognition of a hierarchization between those considered ‘city people’ and ‘village people’ in mainstream Lebanese imaginary that establishes experiences of d…
Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place
Messy refusal’, assimilationist moves, and the reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality
visibly Muslim women in Lebanon, a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, experience significant anti-Muslim racism. Thinking through their anti-racist work, this article identifies and examines a refusal – a pre-emptive move away from power rather than against it that works to make it obsolete and survive despite it. Analysing this movement away, I argue, reveals it as a movement towards a neoliberal ‘civilized’, ‘cultured’, a…
Islamic visibility in Lebanon, the banking sector and Eurocentric modernity
This paper is based on in-depth reflexive and qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2018 thinking alongside visibly Lebanese Muslim women. Based on participants' shared experiences, the paper argues that visibly Muslim women are excluded from employment in the Lebanese banking sector in line with this sector's pursuit and larger alignment with Eurocentric modernity. It identifies powerful narratives of development, progress, and the Lebanese nation-…
Belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess
Through an exercise of decolonial listening, this article works with hijab-wearing women in Lebanon, a small Arab-majority confessional country, to voice, conceptualise, and analyse their lived experience within ‘mainstream Lebanese society’. Investigating their ‘social form’, it advances this lived experience as a belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess, with a ‘wounded habitus’. Accordingly, it argues that a racialisation due to wearing the …
On Academic Research, Legitimacy, and Fieldwork in Times of Crisis
In thinking through the stark differences in how a research project in Lebanon was received in 2018 versus 2020, this paper seeks to reflect on the fragile relationship between academic researcher and community, on the legitimacy of research in moments of crisis, and on the complexity of pursuing decolonial research in the contemporary West Asia North Africa region
Anti-Muslim hate on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean
Informed by the theorization of the modernity/(de)coloniality studies collective, this paper thinks alongside hijabi women in Lebanon – a small Arab Mediterranean country – and their lived experiences in “mainstream Lebanese society”. Drawing on six-months of qualitative fieldwork through in-depth interviews and focus groups with photo-elicitation, the paper documents and analyses lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion and erasure. Identi…
The Modernization of the Hawza
A hawza is the establishment responsible for the training of Shia Islam’s imams, preachers, professors, and researchers. For hundreds of years, its educational model has involved the teaching of Fikh, Usul, philosophy, Quranic studies and Arabic language. Over the past few decades, the social sciences—the systematic study of man and society which had emerged in the West—have been slowly making their way into these institutions, alongside a number…
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
The politics of decolonial investigations
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
The Modernization of the Hawza
A hawza is the establishment responsible for the training of Shia Islam’s imams, preachers, professors, and researchers. For hundreds of years, its educational model has involved the teaching of Fikh, Usul, philosophy, Quranic studies and Arabic language. Over the past few decades, the social sciences—the systematic study of man and society which had emerged in the West—have been slowly making their way into these institutions, alongside a number…
The politics of decolonial investigations
Belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess
Through an exercise of decolonial listening, this article works with hijab-wearing women in Lebanon, a small Arab-majority confessional country, to voice, conceptualise, and analyse their lived experience within ‘mainstream Lebanese society’. Investigating their ‘social form’, it advances this lived experience as a belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess, with a ‘wounded habitus’. Accordingly, it argues that a racialisation due to wearing the …
Knowledge Production in the “Arab-Majority” World and Unlearning in the Field
This paper presents and autoethnographically analyzes three key sites in which the author—a Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim man”—failed to interpellate the lifeworlds of Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim” female participants during a research project in Lebanon: the public-private divide, gender, and the autonomous subject. Specifically, the article identifies key forces that produce this failure, including education, presence in the Westernized university, Westerni…
Messy refusal’, assimilationist moves, and the reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality
visibly Muslim women in Lebanon, a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, experience significant anti-Muslim racism. Thinking through their anti-racist work, this article identifies and examines a refusal – a pre-emptive move away from power rather than against it that works to make it obsolete and survive despite it. Analysing this movement away, I argue, reveals it as a movement towards a neoliberal ‘civilized’, ‘cultured’, a…
The Modernization of the Hawza
A hawza is the establishment responsible for the training of Shia Islam’s imams, preachers, professors, and researchers. For hundreds of years, its educational model has involved the teaching of Fikh, Usul, philosophy, Quranic studies and Arabic language. Over the past few decades, the social sciences—the systematic study of man and society which had emerged in the West—have been slowly making their way into these institutions, alongside a number…
Entrepreneurial Refugees and the City
Lebanon is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees. For a country of its size, and a population of around 4 million, this influx of Syrians into Lebanon has exposed many of its already established ailments. A prevailing perception is that Syrians are establishing businesses and competing with the Lebanese, leading to violent reactions on the part of host communities. In this article, we seek to debunk the reductionist framing of ‘the Syrian r…
On Academic Research, Legitimacy, and Fieldwork in Times of Crisis
In thinking through the stark differences in how a research project in Lebanon was received in 2018 versus 2020, this paper seeks to reflect on the fragile relationship between academic researcher and community, on the legitimacy of research in moments of crisis, and on the complexity of pursuing decolonial research in the contemporary West Asia North Africa region
Anti-Muslim hate on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean
Informed by the theorization of the modernity/(de)coloniality studies collective, this paper thinks alongside hijabi women in Lebanon – a small Arab Mediterranean country – and their lived experiences in “mainstream Lebanese society”. Drawing on six-months of qualitative fieldwork through in-depth interviews and focus groups with photo-elicitation, the paper documents and analyses lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion and erasure. Identi…
Islamic visibility in Lebanon, the banking sector and Eurocentric modernity
This paper is based on in-depth reflexive and qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2018 thinking alongside visibly Lebanese Muslim women. Based on participants' shared experiences, the paper argues that visibly Muslim women are excluded from employment in the Lebanese banking sector in line with this sector's pursuit and larger alignment with Eurocentric modernity. It identifies powerful narratives of development, progress, and the Lebanese nation-…
Belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess
Through an exercise of decolonial listening, this article works with hijab-wearing women in Lebanon, a small Arab-majority confessional country, to voice, conceptualise, and analyse their lived experience within ‘mainstream Lebanese society’. Investigating their ‘social form’, it advances this lived experience as a belated Arabo-Islamic difference in excess, with a ‘wounded habitus’. Accordingly, it argues that a racialisation due to wearing the …
Village-ness , discrimination, and urban modernity
Based on qualitative phenomenological research alongside village dwellers in Lebanon, this article identifies village-ness – an experience of being labelled as ‘non-urban’ with an upbringing and habitus considered to be ‘of the village’ – as difference and lack. I accordingly argue for the recognition of a hierarchization between those considered ‘city people’ and ‘village people’ in mainstream Lebanese imaginary that establishes experiences of d…
Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place
Messy refusal’, assimilationist moves, and the reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality
visibly Muslim women in Lebanon, a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, experience significant anti-Muslim racism. Thinking through their anti-racist work, this article identifies and examines a refusal – a pre-emptive move away from power rather than against it that works to make it obsolete and survive despite it. Analysing this movement away, I argue, reveals it as a movement towards a neoliberal ‘civilized’, ‘cultured’, a…
Knowledge Production in the “Arab-Majority” World and Unlearning in the Field
This paper presents and autoethnographically analyzes three key sites in which the author—a Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim man”—failed to interpellate the lifeworlds of Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim” female participants during a research project in Lebanon: the public-private divide, gender, and the autonomous subject. Specifically, the article identifies key forces that produce this failure, including education, presence in the Westernized university, Westerni…
The politics of decolonial investigations
Complex Integrated Necropolitics
On Teaching Sociology ‘Decolonially’ in Singapore
This article explores the possibilities and challenges of teaching sociology ‘decolonially’ at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. Drawing on the classroom as a site of knowledge, it highlights how students’ diverse lived experiences and epistemic positionalities facilitate the deconstruction of foundational Eurocentric categories including race, religion and modernity. However, hierarchical learning models, competitive educati…
Queer Life and The Muslim Mainstream
Queer Muslims exist. Yet they often dwell across margins of both the Islamic and the queer as they occupy positions deemed incommensurable. Through interpretive qualitative research with Shia Muslim hawzas - the "traditional" institutions authoring contemporary Shiism-and its scholars and teachers, this article explores the Islamic possibility of queer-embracing Islam. Identifying and analyzing the potentiality(ies) of both a queer-affirming and …
Toward a Decolonial Muslim Queerness
Informed by extensive fieldwork within Hawzas in Lebanon – traditional Shia institution training scholars and Imams – this paper thinks alongside three feminine queer Muslim cis men within this Islamic space. Focusing on the body, emotionality, and sexuality, the analysis explores how they experience the Hawza legitimizing and enabling key aspects of their feminine queer dwelling. Crucially, they do not articulate this queer enablement and the en…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Islamic Studies and History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)