Greetings!

I’m an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work focuses on social movements and revolutions, particularly in the Middle East. I’m especially interested in questions of leadership and organization, and how they intersect with gender, class, religion, and ideology.

My fascination with social movements began during my graduate studies in Community Development at UC Davis, where I set out to understand how people confront and respond to systemic injustice. I was drawn to the question of what drives collective action, and how movements organize themselves for impact. This path led me to Cairo, where I conducted in-depth ethnographic research on youth leadership in Egypt’s 2011 revolution. My book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022), is the result of that work. It has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya. I have also presented my work at leading institutions such as Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities.

Building on the book as a foundation, my current project takes up an urgent question: How do we actually achieve revolutionary change in our time? In keeping with my commitment to producing knowledge that supports activists and our movements, it draws on design methodologies to map the complexity of this challenge and imagine new pathways toward a liberatory future.