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Anaheed Al-Hardan and Julian GoAnticolonialism and Social Thought
Monday, October 19, 2026, 5:30–7:00pm
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2026). The volume’s editors, Anaheed Al-Hardan and Julian Go, will be joined in conversation by contributors Arwa Awan and Ibrahim Khan, and Jennifer Pitts will moderate.
Not only did the anticolonial movements of the past two centuries help bring down the global order of colonial empires, they also produced novel, innovative and vital social thought. Anticolonialism has been largely ignored in conventional Europe-centered social thought and theory, but this book shows how our sociological imagination can be expanded by taking challenges to colonialism and imperialism seriously. Amidst their struggles to change the world, anticolonial actors offer devastating critiques of it, challenging the racism, economic exploitation, political exclusions and social inequalities central to imperialism and colonialism. Anticolonial thinkers and activists thereby seek to understand the world they are struggling against and, in the process, develop new concepts and theorize the world in new ways. Edited by Anaheed Al-Hardan and Julian Go, Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025) includes chapters by leading scholars that help uncover this dissident tradition of social thought, as the authors discuss an array of anticolonial thinkers, activists and movements from Palestine, India, South Africa, Brazil, Algeria and beyond.
Arwa Awan is Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. Awan’s research interests lie at the intersection of 20th-century anticolonial political theory and the theories and histories of anticapitalist critique, and her current book project examines how the Marxist concept of alienation was stretched and re-theorized by a strand of anticolonial political thought encompassing figures such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Ali Shariati.
Anaheed Al-Hardan is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She leads the research program Afro-Asian Futures Past, which investigates African-Asian anticolonialism during the Cold War, in collaboration with the American University of Beirut, University of Ghana, University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research examines anticolonial social practices and knowledge-making across the Global South. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016).
Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and The Committee on International Relations. He is also a Fellow of 3CT and former President of the Social Science History Association. Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. His most recent book is Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 2024).
Ibrahim Khan is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. His research takes a historical and normative approach to multiple topics in international legal and political thought and comparative constitutionalism. In the broadest sense, Khan brings Global South perspectives and experiences to the study of international and constitutional law, particularly focusing on war and peace, as well as postcolonial constitutionalism and statehood.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
