Decolonisation of Thinking and Practice

My work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjects, and on political and migratory aspirations from a decolonial perspective and methodology. I turned to anthropology after a MA in philosophy, in which I made a genealogy of the decolonial anthropology proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2010–2012). This led me to researching decolonial political thought and practice in the Siberian and Syrian contexts, and to the de-centring of Eurocentric concepts through close attention to the work of Syrian thinkers and writers, and to work on local concepts enabled by my fluency in Arabic. My work is also very much inspired by non-Western philosophies and epistemology that go against the heritage of the Enlightenment that is still very much prevalent in Western social sciences and humanities.

Moreover, my epistemological and political commitment to my interlocutors shape my practice. I lived in Turkey for the two years of my PhD fieldwork, and settled there for the three following years. During this time I formed deep connections with Syrian families, activists, artists and academics, and attempted to promote refugees, academics and artists’ voices and works through translation and by co-authoring a number of print and online texts. Moreover, I have been involved in several collaborative projects with Syrian academics, artists and activists. I tried to articulate this way of working and writing with, rather than working and writing on, in conference panels (UFSCAR, 2011; U. Paris10, 2012), course on decolonial methodologies (U. Paris8, 2019) and research seminar (EHESS, 2022). This has also informed my writing practice: I have sought feedbacks from my interlocutors on different phases and versions of my work and have stayed in close dialogue with them and co-authoring conference and seminar presentations (EHESS 2022, BRISMES 2023).