International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Discussing Eurocentric “urban modernity”’ is our Topic of the Month for December 2025. On this topic, enjoy this month Free Access to the article by Ali Kassem (National University of Singapore, Singapore) published in International Sociology, Village-ness, discrimination, and urban modernity: Thinking alongside ‘village people’ in Lebanon. Read on to know more about the author’s trajectory and work.

Ali Kassem

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged in that research?

A. Kassem: I grew up in urban Beirut with no connection to any village or non-urban space. As I began to explore Lebanon beyond its urban centres in my early 20s, I gradually came to experience a significant form of difference as well as hierarchization that I realized further intersected with a variety of factors including race and religion. After my master’s degree, I worked with Prof Mona Harb and the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, which brought the spatial and the urban-rural squarely into my preoccupations and research interests. As I went on to develop my PhD and Postdoc work on race and religion from a decolonial south-south perspective, an examination of the urban dimension remained missing and this project was an attempt to systematically examine and address this.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

A. Kassem: You may listen to this podcast from the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh, dated March 3, 2022: Kassem, A.; Dakkak, N. ‘Decolonising Ideas: Decoloniality and the Arab-majority Worlds’ https://anchor.fm/iash/episodes/Decoloniality-and-the-Arab-Majority-World-e1f2tpb

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers please?

A. Kassem: My academic trajectory has been shaped by mobility – crossing various lines of division and seeking to engage with various traditions, spaces, and experiences. I was trained in Beirut, Germany, and the UK. After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Al-Waleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh. I was also a postdoctoral research fellow with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences affiliated to the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. I obtained my PhD in Sociology from the University of Sussex, UK. I have held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Helsinki’s Department of Culture, the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris’ Center for Social Sciences of Religion - CéSor, among others. I am the recipient of multiple awards including the Peter B. Clarke Memorial Award from the British Sociological Association and the University Annual Teaching Excellence Award at the National University of Singapore.

Do you want to add any other information?

A. Kassem: I am immensely grateful for Prof Mona Harb for her mentorship and for the Beirut Urban Lab who are doing a range of wonderful work that especially enabled the research featured here and its outputs. It is these kinds of (rare) spaces that create the infrastructure and enablement that allows for collective generative research and knowledge production.