Status Audio Magazine

Seda Altuğ is a lecturer at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her PhD from Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her dissertation is entitled “Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, Land and Violence in the Memories of World War I and the French Mandate (1915–1939)”. Her research interests are state-society relations in French-Syria, sectarianism, land question, empire, border and memory. Her recent work concerns land, property regimes and citizenship practices in the late Ottoman East and Syria under the French mandate.

Rafeef Ziadah is Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East in the Politics and International Studies Department, SOAS University of London. Her research interests are broadly concerned with the political economy of transport infrastructures, war and humanitarianism, racism and the security state, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Her latest book is Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso, 2020) co-edited Brenna Bhandar.

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.

Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace  and the co-editor with Ali Mirsepassi of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution.  He has published articles on the political economy and history of Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the broader Middle East in journals including Politics and Society, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics, Economy and Society, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Maziyar Ghiabi is Wellcome Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Politics at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London: Cambridge University Press, 2019, also in Open Access) won the 2020 Book of the Year Nikki Keddie Award by the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA). Maziyar's current project is about the experience of 'addiction' in states of disruption and it is funded by the Wellcome Trust, 2021-2026. Beside the politics of health, Maziyar has worked on theoretical and anthropological approaches to revolt, displacement and state formation, the outcome of which will appear in a forthcoming book, States Without People in 2022 with McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.

Dr Olfa Lamloum holds a PhD in political science from Paris 8 University. She taught at the University of Paris-Nanterre before joining the French Institute of the Middle East (IFPO) in Beirut as a researcher.  She is currently the Tunisia country director for the NGO International Alert. She has led several research projects on the relegation of the border areas and working class suburbs in Tunisia. Her latest edited book is Jeunes et violences institutionnelles : Enquêtes dix ans après la révolution(2021) She also co-directed 2 documentary films, including Voices from Kasserine (2017).