About

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions, centering the agency and lived experiences of the people who drive them.

Latif’s research interest in collective action and contentious politics first took shape during her graduate studies in Community Development at UC Davis, where she studied how communities organize for change, focusing on Muslim Americans and their responses to rising Islamophobia, inner-city grassroots activism and community building, and interfaith initiatives to promote pluralism.

In 2011, she traveled to Cairo to conduct ethnographic research on the Egyptian revolution, specifically on the young activists who ignited it. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press 2022), examines leadership and organization within the movement, taking into account questions of gender, class, religion, and ideology. It offers a rare, intimate portrait of the movement’s protagonists and recovers hard-won lessons buried beneath the myth of a leaderless revolution. 

Latif’s research and commentary have appeared on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya, and she has guest lectured at leading institutions nationally and internationally, including Stanford, Yale, and Oxford.

Her next project continues her longstanding inquiry into the conditions that make transformation possible. Building on her book, Tahrir’s Youth, and drawing on her background in design research and innovation, it takes up the urgent question: how might revolutionary change be achieved in our time? In keeping with her commitment to producing knowledge that sustains activists and movements, she is exploring how design methodologies can provide a framework for mapping the complexity of this challenge and imagining new pathways toward a liberatory future. 

In addition to her M.S. in Community Development from UC Davis, she holds a B.A. in History from San Jose State University.