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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The true test of a democracy is the extent to which civil rights in law are enforced in practice for the most vulnerable groups in society. As members of Congress demanded mass arrest and expulsion of college students exercising their free speech right to dissent against U.S. foreign policy in Gaza and the West Bank, the racial fault lines in American democracy were yet again laid bare.

Similarly, university presidents are buckling to external political pressure to violate academic freedom of Muslim and Arab faculty targeted by external anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli groups and politicians. In this episode, Distinguished Law Professor Sahar Aziz examines how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism intersect to produce systematic assaults on the civil rights of racialized communities.

These concerted efforts to quash the nonviolent Palestine Solidarity Movement set dangerous rights-infringing precedents that are now being weaponized against immigrant rights advocates and supporters of diversity, equity and inclusion. The same conservative groups and politicians who complain about the erosion of free speech in America are now spearheading the policing of viewpoints and speech expressed by progressive students and faculty on college campuses.

Listen to Professor Aziz as she explains the origins and harmful consequences of the Palestine Taboo on all American’s free speech and political freedoms, which is the basis of her forthcoming book on the topic.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #PalestineTaboo #FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom

Suggested Readings

Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (2022)

Mitchell Plitnick and Sahar Aziz, Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine Israel Discourse (2023)

Sahar Aziz, Racing Religion in the Palestine Israel Discourse, AJIL Unbound , Volume 118 , 2024 , pp. 118 – 123.

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In Part II of this two-part series, guest host Esaa Mohammad Sabti Samarah, PhD, LMSW reunites with Dr. Siham Elkassem, Dr. Bryn King, Dr. Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer, and doctoral candidate Amilah Baksh to move beyond naming harm and toward a deeper examination of responsibility. This episode turns a critical lens on how the social work profession responds, or fails to respond, to anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racisms, with particular attention to the ways calls for “neutrality” shape research, teaching, and professional practice.

The conversation interrogates neutrality as it appears in social work academia, especially in relation to empiricism and claims of objectivity. The panel introduces and critically examines the concept of “weepy universalism,” a term they coin for social workers in their forthcoming work to describe how generalized expressions of sympathy can obscure power, flatten difference, and ultimately reproduce harm rather than challenge it.

The episode also brings these debates down from theory to practice, exploring what they mean for social workers on the ground, particularly those working with youth and communities most directly impacted by these forms of racism. The series closes with a collective call to action, challenging the profession to move beyond symbolic gestures and toward principled, sustained solidarity with Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, as part of broader struggles for justice and liberation.

This episode invites listeners to reckon with complicity, resist comfort, and reimagine what ethical practice demands in moments of profound injustice.

#BeyondNeutrality #EthicalSocialWork #SolidarityNotSilence #WeepyUniversalism #YouthJustice #DecolonizeSocialWork #JusticeInAction

Links to Published Works

Dwaikat-Shaer, N., Baksh, A., Elkassem, S., & King, B. (2025). Phenomenologies of Silence: On the Palestine Exception and the Complicity of Social Work Academe. Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, 3(2).

Siham Elkassem - Google Scholar

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