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 research traces an ethnography of everyday crisis attentive to the politics of class and class subjectivities in Lebanon.
Situated in the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastating 2019 financial and economic collapse, my 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. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how Lebanon's middle class—both a product and a cornerstone of the now-defunct political economic model—renegotiate identities, recover meaning, and reconstruct attachments amidst dramatic collapse and class dislocation. While the material implications of this crisis have gained increased attention, much less attention has been given to the impacts of this collapse on class subjectivities, particularly the subjectivities of members of the middle classes, once a cornerstone of the model’s fraught (in)/stability. My research examines the kinds of agentive tactics and coping mechanisms that emerge under conditions of class dislocation and dramatic collapse, demonstrating the impacts of these adaptive strategies on political subjectivities, relationship to the state, and the capacity of political economic regimes to reproduce themselves—through the minutiae of everyday practices within which people maneuver and adapt. The erosion of class locations is not an isolated or bounded phenomena but rather speaks to the global crisis of capitalism.
My broader research agenda interrogates the interplay between crisis, political subjectivity, and the reproduction of power under contemporary capitalism. My MA research at the American University of Beirut (AUB) examines challenges facing “new” political actors and contemporary movements seeking alternatives to party-centric organization. I analyze these challenges in relation to the uncontested hegemony of neoliberalism and its impacts on mobilization structures and repertoires as well as perceptions of contentious politics and social change in the Arab world. I argue that the proliferation of media-savvy civil society forms consolidated fragmentation and individualization, displacing contentious politics with consensual, depoliticized expressive politics rather than building durable representative formations.
Extending questions of contentious politics into the realm of environmental sociology and development studies, my second MA in Sociology at UIUC analyzes the World Bank–funded Bisri Dam—an emblematic case of a high-modernist project that has foundered on a mix of hydrogeological recalcitrance, popular opposition and compounding crises. I reconceptualize failure not as aberration but as constitutive of high-modernist development, its techno-liberal prescriptions, and speculative logics of ruination—yet also potentially generative, catalyzing new political imaginaries and historical subjectivities.
In a collaborative research project (with Hossein Cheaito), I build on my fieldwork in post-crisis Lebanon to explore Lebanon’s financial collapse through the lens of LGBTQ+ experiences. Integrating feminist economics, queer theory, and social reproduction theory, the research proposes ‘queer debt’ as both a lived experience and an analytical framework that exposes the extractive mechanisms of financial capitalism.
Across these projects, I develop an ethnographic and relational critique of neoliberalism that foregrounds the tension between crisis and consent, dispossession and social struggles. These projects benefited from numerous intellectual engagements in international academic conferences, culminated in several peer-reviewed journal articles, and received prestigious awards (see CV/research statement).
Research Interests: Political Sociology, Political Economy, Global/Transnational Sociology, Global middle classes, class subjectivities, Crisis & Everyday Politics, Social Movements.
Dissertation Title (tentative): “Crisis & Politics of Class in Lebanon”
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Asef Bayat (Sociology)
Dissertation Committee: Dr. Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology); Dr. Matthew Soener (Sociology); Dr. Rima Majed (Sociology, American University of Beirut, Lebanon)
