Profile picture for Mona Khneisser

Contact Information

702 S Wright St
3120 Lincoln Hall
Urbana, IL 61801
MC 454
PhD Candidate

Biography

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).

 

 

Research Interests

Political sociology

Political economy

Crisis and Everyday Politics

Global middle classes, class subjectivities

Social Theory

Critical development studies

Global/Transnational Sociology

Social movements

Grants

University of Illinois, Illinois Distinguished Fellowship (2019-2022)

American Political Science Association (APSA), MENA Collaborative Grant (2022)

University of Illinois, Department of Sociology, Summer Writing Fellowship (2022)

American Political Science Association (APSA), Professional Development Grant (2021)

Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Wadad Kadi Student Travel Fellowship (2021)

University of Illinois, Department of Sociology, Douglas Barnes Scholarship (2021)

University of Illinois Graduate College, Dissertation Travel Grant (2021)

Awards and Honors

Illinois Distinguished Fellowship (2019-2022)

Erik Olin Wright Best Article Award, SAGE Critical Sociology (2020)

Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Graduate Student Paper Prize (2022)

 

 

 

Highlighted Publications

Publications

Khneisser, 2024. Rethinking Failure: Speculative Infrastructure, Recalcitrant Hydrogeologies & Popular Contention Against The Bisri Dam in Lebanon. Development & Change, 55(3): 351-374.

Khneisser, 2020. The Specter of ‘Politics’ & Ghosts of ‘Alternatives’ Past: Lebanese ‘Civil Society’ and the Antinomies of Contemporary Politics. Critical Sociology, 46(3): 359-377.

Khneisser, 2019. The Marketing of Protest and Antinomies of Collective Organization in Lebanon. Critical Sociology, 45(7-8): 1111-1132.

 

Khneisser, 2019. ‘Civil Societies’ & the Arab Uprisings- Prospects for Socio-Political Change: A Comparative Analysis of the Ongoing Tunisian & Egyptian Plight. In Nasser Yassin & Robert Hobbe (Eds.) Women, Civil Society and Policy Change in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillan.

 

 

Recent Publications