About this event:

Amidst an ostensibly successful transition along the axes of liberal parliamentary democracy since the 2011 revolution, a group of Tunisian left militants have organized their own spaces of deliberation and ethical cultivation. Among these is the ciné-club, an assembly that combines film screenings and discussion. By unearthing the diverse chronotopes – temporal and spatial dimensions – of Tunisian revolutionary thought and praxis, the ciné-club assembly disrupts hegemonic understandings of liberal citizenship. By virtue of this disruption, the assembly exposes not only the long legacy of protest in Tunisia, but also the diverse understandings of revolution and democracy among the Tunisian citizenry today. The returns of local and global revolutions in the Tunisian present offer us the opportunity to delve into the intricacies of the social life of left political thought and praxis.

Speaker - Charis Boutieri

Biography A British Academy mid-career fellow for 2021-2022, Charis Boutieri is a social anthropologist of North Africa based at King’s College London and author of Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream (IUP 2016). Thanks to funding from the Leverhulme Trust UK and the British Academy, she is currently completing her second monograph on the emergence of the public sphere in post-revolutionary Tunisia. She is co-founder of a research collective working on the concept of ‘non-liberal public spheres’ with a view to synthesize the multi-strand study of non-liberal deliberation with democratic imagination and practice. Charis has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Tunis (2015) and at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASHH) at Cambridge University (2018). She is associate editor of the Journal of North African Studies.