Status Audio Magazine

Bassel Salloukh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. He is co-author of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (2015) and Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (2012) and co-editor of Persistent Permeability? Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (2004). He is a senior fellow at the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies (LCPS) and a member of the Arab Political Science Network’s Advisory Committee for 2019-2021. His current research interests include an intersectional critique of power-sharing arrangements in postwar states, the philosophy of reconciliation in divided societies, and Middle East International Relations after the popular uprisings.

Lara Bitar is an independent media worker who works in Beirut, Lebanon, and the founding editor of journalist-run publication The Public Source. Her media practice is founded on a deep sense of place — a geographical imperative — which centers marginalized communities and connects their struggles to broader frameworks.

Over the past decade, she took on different editorial leadership roles in digital, broadcast, and print journalism. Bitar’s former professional engagements include producing the Peabody Award-winning Middle East news show Mosaic News at Link TV in San Francisco, and leading editorial teams at the digital freedoms organization SMEX and the online publication Al-Akhbar English.

Bitar contributes reports on social movements and civil unrest to grassroots media projects in the US and Lebanon and writes for regional and feminist publications. Committed to labor struggles and radicalizing the local press, Bitar is organizer of a Beirut-based media collective for independent and freelance journalists.

To varying degrees, her current work revolves around altering the future of the (local) press, politicizing work(ers), and organizing freelancers. Her current research interests include archives of/as resistance and the role of protest memories.

Dr. Rima Majed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is currently a visiting fellow at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University. As a political sociologist, her work focuses on the fields of social inequality, social movements, social identities, sectarianism, conflict and violence.

Dr. Majed has completed her PhD at the University of Oxford where she conducted her research on the relationship between structural changes, social mobilization, and sectarianism in Lebanon. Prior to that, she has worked as a Program Assistant and a Senior Researcher at the United Nations Development Program – Arab States Bureau. Dr. Majed is the author of numerous articles and op-eds. Her work has appeared in Mobilization, Global Change, Peace & Security, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, and Al Jazeera English.