In today’s episode, guest host Nermin Allam, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and associate professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark, speaks with Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, to reflect on remembering and commemorating the January 25th uprising.

The January 25th uprising, which led to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, remains one of the most consequential moments in Egypt’s modern political history. The uprising restructured political imagination, reordered lives, and briefly redefined what felt possible.

Every year, January 25th asks something of us. It asks us to remember. It asks us to reckon. And it asks us to return carefully and critically to a moment that continues to unsettle our present. This episode is part of that reckoning. As we mark the anniversary of the uprising, we are joined by Rusha Latif to revisit the experiences of the young people who animated that moment and who carried its weight forward long after the chants faded and the public space closed.

The conversation invites us to resist simplification and to honor the complexity of a revolutionary moment whose political afterlives still shape how we understand protest, possibility, and loss. It invites listeners to consider what it means to commemorate a revolution in a time when its promises remain unfinished.

Biography

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution is published by the AUC Press, in 2022).

Bio Link: https://rushalatif.com/

Publication: https://rushalatif.com/tahrirs-youth/

Nermin Allam is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a nonresident fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Allam’s research focuses on gender politics and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Allam’s work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, Democratization among other journals.

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