Dr Sophie Chamas

Sophie Chamas's research and scholarship is concerned with the relationship between the imagination and socio-political change. Their work examines the intellectual and cultural production of marginalised and dissenting actors and their allies in the Middle East and its diaspora, focusing in particular on how they navigate impasses, aftermaths, catastrophes, and stuckedness in pursuit of the capacity to imagine and enact socio-political transformation. They are also invested in analysing the speculative dimensions of state power and the cultivation of panicked imaginaries in its service, examining attempts at countering the colonisation of the future with alternative articulations of and investments in the 'not-yet'.
 

Sophie's work sits at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge, feminist and queer political theory, Middle East and more broadly postcolonial studies, social movements studies, and cultural studies, and examines the role that affects such as paranoia, grief, joy, and rage, conditions such as the spectral, and orientations such as the speculative, play in reproducing power and enabling resistance.

They have written about the evolving nature of queerphobia as a means of authorising state power in the Middle East; queer Arab re-imaginings of both queerness and Arabness and the potentiality of their dialectical relationship; the effects of ghosts and hauntings from bygone moments of political possibility on the present and future of Middle East-related social movements; and the role that affect and sociality play in the reproduction of social movements in the region and its diaspora.

They are currently working on a book project about political conjuring as a means of grappling with and moving past the debilitating effects of revolutionary defeat as structure of feeling. The project focuses on the political potentiality of cultivating 'revolutionary debt' in Lebanon by turning affectively and intellectually towards political ancestors.

All of their research is informed by what anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki calls 'hope as method' (2004) – a dedication to exploring what is not yet rather than what has already become."