Mona Khneisser

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and aim to defend in May 2026. As a global/transnational sociologist, my work contributes broadly to debates across political sociology, social movement theories, political economy, feminist economics and critical development studies. My current doctoral research theorizes the politics of class through close ethnographic attention to middle-class subjectivities and everyday life amidst the financial and economic collapse in Lebanon.

My broader research agenda interrogates the interplay between crisis, political subjectivity, and the reproduction of power under contemporary capitalism. My previous works included an analysis of Lebanon’s 2015 garbage crisis and the challenges facing alternative forms of collective mobilization and organization (MA research in Sociology at AUB), and was published in the Journal of Critical Sociology and awarded the Erik Olin Wright Distinguished Article Award (2020).

More recently, my research examined the collective contention surrounding the World Bank-funded Bisri Dam project, offering a material hydro-geological lens on post-colonial state-building, and the political economy of infrastructural failure in Lebanon (MA research in Sociology at UIUC), and was published in the Journal Development & Change and awarded the MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize (2022).