Emel Akcali - The Challenges of State and Societal Trans-formation in (Post)

At IMERA, Emel Akçalı will concentrate on her research on the challenges of the state and societal transformation process in post-revolutionary Tunisia where she has been conducting fieldwork since March 2013. By drawing upon insights from various disciplines: sociology, history, political science, international relations, philosophy and social psychology, her research scrutinizes the new forms of subjectivities, hybrid identities and transformed structures which have emerged as a result of the post-Revolutionary process in Tunisia. In so doing, Akçalı’s work aims to problematize whether a successfully functioning representative democracy, a liberal constitution and a flourishing civil society now indicate that the Tunisian socio-political actors have been able to genuinely transform the social structures and social relations within which they have been embedded at both local and global levels The research project will also examine the theoretical added value of critical realist premises to the Foucauldian governmentality framework, in order to be able to analyse the scope for genuine revolutionary change at state and societal level.