Sari Hanafi
Sari Hanafi is currently a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut and chair of the Islamic Studies program.
Predominantly ethnographic in nature, Hanafi's research methodology involves participant observation techniques, qualitative interviews, and focus groups, but also more quantitative such as survey and network analysis.
Hanafi has co-authored book with Rigas Arvanitis, Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise (2015).
The book received six reviews and a published debate in al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi between three scholars in the field of knowledge production: Antoun Zahlan, Adnan al-Amin and Mustafa al-Teer.
As a result of the book, Hanafi has encouraged the translation of scholarly works into Arabic, in an attempt to revitalize local and regional deliberation on societal issues.
This research project aims to clarify the relationship between power, sovereignty and space in Palestinian refugee camps in the Arab East, during 2009–2010.
[11] Hanafi also took part in a multi-disciplinary research team on “Poverty assessment and targeting projects for Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon.” The research team is composed of AUB faculty (a sociologist, a nutritionist, a public health specialist, and an economist) and headed by economist Dr. Jad Shaaban.
The spacio-cide is a deliberate ideology with unified rational, albeit dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context and the actions of the Palestinian resistance.
[citation needed] Hanafi's approach to sociology has been greatly influenced by changes triggered by the Arab uprisings since 2011.
Yet, he sets three conditions for a concept to be a universal: the first being that it must be the outcome of a quasi-cross-cultural consensus, and not a mere export of values embedded in the Euro-American context.
Current research He currently deals mainly with two topics: first, a continuation of his work on knowledge production and knowledge used in the region, through his work with the Issam Fares Institute on “social impact of scientific research.” To this end, he launched the Portal for Social Impact of Scientific Research in/on the Arab World (Athar)[4] in March 2018.
Hanafi has stated that he believes that good scientists are not always popular, and yet he is an advocate of greater involvement of academics and universities in their local societies and the acknowledgement of different regimes of knowledge.
Civil society, for him, is playing a major role in using knowledge produced within the university and in generating knowledge-based debates in public sphere, including religious spaces, where social science has historically been unable to penetrate, and at times openly hostile.
Many of his research projects, and his involvement in the IFI program ‘Policy and Governance in Palestinian Refugee Camps,’ were a sort of action-research.
The Portal for Social Impact of Scientific Research in/on the Arab World (Athar) that he founded was an instrumental tool in this regard.
Furthermore, Hanafi founded in 2005 the monthly Sociology Café, which aims at creating a forum for informal discussions between students, professors and the public on critical issues related to life in Lebanon and the region.
This steered local debates that denounced in the same times and in varying degree the Lebanese authority and the Palestinian political factions.
Here he faced another problem how to conduct public research without losing its critical edge, even toward the deprived groups such as the Palestinian refugees, it seeks to protect.
