This event launches Professor John Chalcraft’s new book, .
Professor John Chalcraft will be joined in conversation by Professor Paul Apostolidis (LSE), Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE) and Professor Laurence Cox (Maynooth University).
How can the great many who oppose neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, and neofascism overcome their many weaknesses and divisions and build for fundamental social transformation?
Chalcraft’s new book aims to offer an answer to this vexing question by presenting a thorough new theory of popular mobilization.
The work is based on the writings of the Italian revolutionary intellectual, Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937), on Gramscian research, and on case studies from all over the world. It offers an alternative to conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and poststructuralism. The goal is a theory which can link together diverse popular struggles amid the crises of the contemporary world. If you would like to know more about the book, you can read Chalcraft's blog post,
This is a free public event open to all. Registration is required.
Meet the speakers
John Chalcraft graduated with a starred first in history (M.A. Hons) from Gonville and Caius college Cambridge in 1992. He then did post-graduate work at Harvard, Oxford and New York University, from where he received his doctorate with distinction in the modern history of the Middle East in January 2001. He held a Research Fellowship at Caius college (1999-2000) and was a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh University from 2000-05. He is currently Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government at the LSE. He has written several books including; Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony (Palgrave, 2007), The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2009), Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories (SUNY Press 2012), Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (CUP 2016) and now (University of California Press, 2025).
Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the 911勛圖Department of Gender Studies. Her work combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia. She is most recently the author of Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021), which won both the Susan Strange Book Prize and Sussex International Theory Prize in 2022. Professor Madhok is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).
Paul Apostolidis specialises in critical theory and integrating empirical inquiry into methods of political theory. A major arm of his research derives insights for critiques of capitalism and racial domination from fieldwork with Latinx migrant workers’ organisations and communities in the western United States. and contesting precarity through popular education comprise key themes in his most recent research. Prof Apostolidis’s published writings explore prospects for deeper democracy and social solidarity through reflecting on this empirical work while engaging diverse 20th-21st century thinkers including Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, Kathi Weeks, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Cristina Beltrán, and Lauren Berlant. His earlier research analyses the cultural politics of the US Christian Right through a critical approach derived from Theodor Adorno and he has written extensively in cultural studies, including on issues of gender, sexuality and power.
is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and educator whose work explores two key aspects of the making of the modern world: how can we understand the extraordinary variety of ways in which social movements from below have developed and sometimes reshaped societies, and how has the long historical conversation between “Eastern” and “Western” cultures been mediated through the globalisation of Buddhisms? As an engaged social movements researcher, his work is best known for dialogue with movement practitioners about how to understand movement development: the conversation with Marxism, feminism and other theoretical analyses originating from movements; co-founding the practitioner-oriented journal Interface, co-developing a Master’s in activism and supervising participatory action research in movements; and work in social movement learning and knowledge production. He has published on European and Irish movements and revolutions as well as struggles in the Niger Delta and southeast Mexico. Most recently he co-edited a Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements (Elgar 2024), the first such handbook to take a global approach to the subject. He is particularly interested in how social movements can contribute to staving off climate collapse and the rise of authoritarianism.
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