Project summary
This research aims at understanding the role of Syrian grassroots intellectuals in the formation of a new generation of Arab intellectuals since the 2011 Syrian Uprising.
Project details
Location: Syria
Year(s): 2018
Project director(s): Adélie Chevée (SOAS, University of London)
Lead institutions and funding:
- CBRL
Project description
This research aims at understanding the role of Syrian grassroots intellectuals in the formation of a new generation of Arab intellectuals since the 2011 Syrian Uprising.
As a new generation of political writers emerged from the Uprising, they launched print media at local levels. In this new press, debates aroused over the role of the public intellectual, the legitimacy to speak for the revolutionaries and the meaning of political commitment.
The CBRL travel grant funded five-and-a-half-months of fieldwork in Beirut in order to collect data for discourse analysis and qualitative case-study of young Syrian intellectuals. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews (about 52 hours in total) were conducted with writers, journalists, academics, filmmakers, and actors of the cultural field – both Syrian and Lebanese. I conducted 15 nonparticipant observations of intellectual-related events (about 20 hours in total) and organised a focus group with Syrian students in a Lebanese university.
Project bibliography
Chevée, Adélie. 2020. Grassroots intellectuals of the Syrian
revolution, 2011-2017. Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant 2018-2019, p 20.
Published:26 November 2021
