Beyond the "Scholar Activist" Label: Reflections on Positionality in the Lebanon's 2019 Uprising

Rare are the instances when a scholar of social movements finds herself in the middle of a revolutionary uprising at home. For more than a decade, I have been engaged in reading and studying waves of uprisings and revolutions in other countries from an academic perspective. In the afternoon of October 17, 2019 - on a casual day in Beirut - history suddenly took a major turn with the eruption of an uprising of an unprecedented scale and spread. Within hours, the streets and squares of major cities from North to South of the country were filled with hundreds of thousands demanding the downfall of the regime. I found myself amongst the masses, making similar demands. In this roundtable discussion, I want to reflect on three main questions: (1) who gets to write our (hi)story? through a reflection on the role of foreign reporters and academics; and the ethics of extractivism in knowledge production; (2) what is the role of the engaged academic beyond the "scholar/activism" framework? through a reflection on positionally, and a critique of the colonial "mission civilisatrice" approach that is prevalent in academic culture; and (3) how do we produce theory from within the unfolding events? through a reflection on "messiness" as an analytic category.