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Yasmeen Daifallah
Assistant Professor of Politics

 I am an Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research is primarily concerned with exploring the critical potential of postcolonial political theory. The archive I have been working with for the past few years is that of contemporary Arab thought, with a specific focus on broad-ranging philosophical projects aiming at the reinterpretation of the Islamic tradition in the 1970s-1990s. I examine these projects as sites of conceptual and interpretive strategies that aim to transform their readers’ understanding of their social and political reality by offering a critique of current dispositions towards politics, and a set of resources for crafting alternative political visions. I am currently finishing a book manuscript on this topic entitled Theorize and Decolonize: The Political Subject in Contemporary Arab Thought. In the past, I have written about decolonial interpretation in Arab political thought (Daifallah 2019), modern(ist) conceptions of al-turath al-‘arabi al-islamiyy as a mode of critique in contemporary Islamic thought (Daifallah 2019), as well as the use of the Marxist (Daifallah 2017) and phenomenological (Daifallah 2017) philosophical traditions to launch critical projects by contemporary Arab thinkers.