✦ What: Join us as we mark fifteen years since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution with a conversation on the experiences of the young people who ignited it and the lessons their struggle offers.

Drawing on Rusha Latif’s book Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, based on her first-hand research during the revolution, we will explore questions of movement-building and political imagination in a moment defined by the devastation in Gaza and the global movement for Palestinian liberation. The discussion will reflect on how the legacy of Tahrir speaks to the challenges facing the Ummah today.

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. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (2022), draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo during the 2011 uprising to examine activist agency in the absence of formal leadership.

Yasmeen Daifallah is an Assistant Professor of Politics at UCSC, specializing in Arab and Islamic political thought, postcolonial theory, and Middle East politics. She earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has taught at UMass-Amherst and USC.