Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions, particularly in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022), draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo during the 2011 uprising to examine activist agency in the absence of formal leadership. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya, and she has guest lectured at leading institutions nationally and internationally, including Stanford, Yale, and Oxford, among others. 

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work centers on social movements and revolutions, with a particular focus on how people organize for change and how gender, class, religion, and ideology shape revolutionary subjectivities and collective action.

Latif’s research began during her masters studies in Community Development at UC Davis, where she examined the social and political conditions that inspire grassroots movements. In 2011, she traveled to Cairo to conduct ethnographic research during Egypt’s uprising, studying the young activists who helped lead the revolution. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022), is an activist ethnography that investigates leadership and organization within horizontal movements.

Her work has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya, and she has guest lectured at Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, among others. Building on Tahrir’s Youth, her current project explores how contemporary movements can imagine and enact revolutionary change through design methodologies that map social complexity and chart new pathways toward liberation.