Intimate Legacies

Intimate Legacies is a workshop that invited students to utilize concepts drawn from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace how actors maintained/modified their social entanglements in the context of the October 2019 protests. Protest is often idealistically and empirically conceived as a collective category where homogenous social groups gather to form a larger social collective, often in central urban public spaces. In describing the 2019 Lebanon protests, this is evident in narratives about “the Lebanese” (vs. foreigners), “the people” (vs. the herd), “the citizens” (vs. subjects), or “non-sectarian groups” (vs. sectarian communities) gathering in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square or Tripoli’s Sahet Al-Nour.

However, the 2019 Lebanon protests showed how heterogenous identities, ideologies, and orientations gathered under unified slogans (كلن یعني كلن), a heterogeneity which generated sharp political divisions in the protests’ aftermath.

Moreover, these mass protests decentered public space – or more suitably “protest space” – from city proper and major cities to the extended urbanized areas including towns, villages, infrastructural spaces, and privately owned empty lots. Students, through tracing the intimate legacies of the October 2019 protests, analyzed the multi-layered individual experiences and entanglements in this event.

Moreover, these mass protests decentered public space – or more suitably “protest space” – from city proper and major cities to the extended urbanized areas including towns, villages, infrastructural spaces, and privately owned empty lots.

Workshop One Lead: Dr. Fadi Shayya

Student Participants:


Alexandra Harb

Christina R Karam

Christina Karam

Georges Hajj

Marcelle El Achkar

Marianne Mouzaya

Sharbel Karam