Social Media Consumption and Food-Consumption in Contemporary Kuwait

The LSE Middle East Centre hosted a Kuwait Programme workshop, presenting research on the influence of social media on food-consumption behaviours in Kuwait. Kuwait is experiencing public health challenges driven by rising rates of non-communicable nutrition-related diseases such as diabetes and obesity. According to the World Bank, the prevalence of diabetes in Kuwait increased tenfold between 2000 and 2021, with approximately 25% of Kuwaiti adults now affected. Adding to this issue is the widespread social media culture in Kuwait surrounding food photography. There is a significant trend among individuals, as well as social media influencers, to share food-related content on platforms. The extensive use of digital platforms, combined with Kuwait's unique social media culture, offer new and unique avenues for studying how online content and interactions might shape food-consumption behaviours. This research addresses the influence of social media on food-consumption behaviours in Kuwait. Meet our speakers Fabrício M. Fialho is Assistant Professor of Sociology at HSE University and Research Fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute. His current work has focused on public opinion research and quantitative research methods. Abrar Al Hasan is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the College of Business Administration, Kuwait University. Her research interests include Social Media and Social Networks, Health IT, Online Markets, Digital Innovations, Crowdsourcing, and the Economics of Information Systems. Meet our chair Dr Aygen Kurt-Dickson is Senior Innovation Development Manager in the LSE Innovation & Impact team focuses on enhancing LSE’s I&I ecosystem through improved connections between LSE research and innovation and by building internal and external relationships to facilitate innovation.

In the final episode of this season, Ahmad Abu Hussien, an urban sociologist from Jordan, brings together academics and practitioners to explore theories of urban planning and design through case studies of Jordan and Dubai. This episode explores the concept of infrastructural citizenship, a framework that helps us understand infrastructure not simply as roads, public spaces, water or sewage networks, but as a political and social system that shapes belonging in the city. In this way, Ahmad and his guests look at how certain communities are excluded from the city, and how theory can inform practice in building apps, policies and physical spaces for the better. Ahmad Abu Hussien is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity and a sociologist specialising in urban inequalities. He is also the co-founder of AZHJ, a research consultancy focused on reducing disparities in cities and between cities, which works at the intersection of urban policy, governance, and research, with a focus on the Global South. Deyala Tarawneh is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Jordan, and Deputy Dean of Training and Alumni Affairs. She is deeply engaged in professional and institutional planning practice, including in roles with the Jordanian Engineering Institution, as well as supporting women in engineering and urban development. Harun Jweinat is Co-Founder and Director of Design and Logistics at AZHJ. His work bridges art and spatial justice with a strong focus on translating complex urban ideas through practice and community facing work. Huda Shaka is a chartered urban planner and a chartered environmentalist. Her work involves advising on city and regional plans, master plans and mega infrastructure projects as well as strategic policy frameworks for future-ready cities. https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/fellows/2023/ahmad-zeyad-abu-hussien

In this penultimate episode, Yara Shawky Shahin has a frank discussion with her colleague Yasmine D’Alessandro about how to create programmes of real economic empowerment for women in the Middle East and North Africa based on their decades long experience working with international and grassroots organisations in the region. Yara Shawky Shahin is an Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity and a researcher and civil society professional with more than 20 years of experience in the fields of development, human rights, policy analysis, and not-for-profit management. Yara has worked with different organisations including UNHCR, Save the Children, and UNDP in programs supporting youth participation, inclusion, and integration. With the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute, and recently Ford Foundation, her work focused on programs supporting media reform, freedom of expression, digital rights, and the impact of technology on society as well as advocating for inclusive social protections across countries of the MENA region. Yasmine D’Alessandro is a senior development expert with over two decades of experience in the gender, economic empowerment, skills development and civil society fields. Yasmine has a solid grounding in program design, strategic planning, and program management across a wide spectrum of organisations, ranging from consultancy firms and international NGOs to independent grant-making institutions. Over the course of her career, she has successfully led initiatives that address complex social and economic challenges, in communities such as rural Upper Egypt, remote communities in Yemen, refugee camps in Jordan and pockets of poverty in urban centres in various countries, always with a focus on building sustainable and locally grounded impact. She has been consistently committed to bridging the gap between policy and practice, ensuring that programs are not only well-designed but also contextually relevant and responsive to community needs. Find out more about Yara's work here: https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/fellows/2023/yara-shawky-shahin

In this episode, Diana Magdy, a gender equality specialist, feminist researcher and oral historian has a conversation with Professor Hoda Elsadda unpacking the politics of archiving, revealing archives as spaces of power and resistance rather than neutral repositories. Diana Magdy is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity and a feminist researcher and gender equality specialist from Cairo, Egypt. She has 12 years of experience in gender and development. As a feminist oral historian, she has worked on documenting the Egyptian feminist movement, producing feminist knowledge in Arabic, and archive building. In this area, she published a paper titled ‘Narrating Gender in Egypt's Public Sphere: The Archive of Women’s Oral History’. Professor Hoda Elsadda is a feminist activist, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, and Co-founder of the Women and Memory Forum. She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. Her research interests are in the areas of gender studies, comparative literature and oral history. She is author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (Edinburgh UP and Syracuse UP, 2012); and co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers, 35:1, 2018). Find out more about Diana's work: https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/fellows/2023/diana-magdy Find out more about Hoda's work: https://wmf.org.eg/en/member/hoda-elsadda/

Return of Tyranny explains why counterrevolutions both emerge and succeed, marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900. It also offers a fresh perspective and new evidence on the reversal of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, one of the most prominent recent episodes of counterrevolution. The book forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace, both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power. Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt’s are much more vulnerable – though the book also identifies a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. By preserving their elite coalitions and broad popular support, these movements can return to mass mobilization to thwart counterrevolutionary threats. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, Return of Tyranny sheds light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics. Meet our speakers Killian Clarke is an Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, affiliated with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His research focuses on revolution, protest, democratization, and authoritarianism with a regional focus on the Middle East. He is the author of Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge University Press, 2025), as well as peer-reviewed articles in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. Hazem Kandil is the Cambridge University Professor of Historical and Political Sociology, Fellow of St Catharine’s College and Head of Department. He studies power relations and social interactions, focusing on war, regime change, intellectuals and ideology in America, Europe, and the Middle East. He holds a PhD in Sociology from UCLA, and MA degrees in Political Theory and International Relations. His publications include Power Triangle: Military, Security, and Politics in Regime Change (Oxford University Press 2016), Inside the Brotherhood (Polity 2014), and Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen (Verso 2012). Kandil received the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2014) and a ProFutura Scientia Fellowship (2016). After finishing a book project on US military campaigns from 1960 to the present, he started a new one on encounters with Critical Theory. Meet our chair Katerina Dalacoura is Associate Professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Director of the LSE Middle East Centre. She held a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust between 2021 and 2024. The project findings will shortly be published as a book monograph by Cambridge University Press, under the title Islamic International Thought in Turkey: History, Civilisation and Nation.

By bringing together academics and journalists that utilise gender and media studies, as well as history and international relations, this interdisciplinary panel will speak to the relationship between the family and nation-building, the role of media and advertising in representing the mother figure, and through real life stories explore how people in the Middle East and the diaspora have redefined what family looks like. Meet our speakers Dr Polly Withers is a feminist cultural studies researcher, currently leading the Leverhulme Early Career Project ‘Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Advertising and its Resistances in the Levant’, which considers how commercial advertising mediates shifts in gender and sexuality in post-Oslo Palestine and current-day Jordan. Prior to this, Polly’s work focused on the gender and sexuality politics of 'alternative' music and subcultural participation in contemporary Palestine and its diaspora. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, the British Journal of Middle East Studies, and related gender and cultural studies outlets. She is currently working on a single-author monograph based on her Leverhulme research. Dr Andrew Delatolla is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds. His research interests centre on the intersections of race and sexuality in relation to statehood and state formation. He has recently concluded a funded project examining the politics of LGBTIQ+ rights in the Spanish overseas territories of Ceuta and Melilla and is currently part of an AHRC-DFG funded project examining transformations in gender and sexual governance in post-Soviet Muslim majority republics. His recent publications include a co-authored chapter, with Karim Chedid, in the anthology This Queer Arab Family edited by Elias Jahshan and a co-authored article with Hossein Cheaito in the European Journal of Politics and Gender on LGBTIQ+ activism in Lebanon. Elias Jahshan (he/him) is a Lebanese-Palestinian journalist and writer, and the editor of groundbreaking anthologies THIS ARAB IS QUEER (2022) and THIS QUEER ARAB FAMILY (2025), both published by Saqi Books. This Arab Is Queer was a 2023 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the USA and shortlisted for the 2023 Bread & Roses Award in the UK, and has been translated into Italian and soon in French. His short memoirs have been published in several anthologies, and he has written for The Guardian, The New Arab, Raseef22, My Kali, and more. Meet our chair Hakan Sandal-Wilson is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies. He is a political sociologist whose teaching and research explore how gender and sexuality intersect with democracy, conflict, and ethnic and religious difference.

The lecture examines the various economic, institutional, and political factors that are driving these approaches to health system reform drawing on work by the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience (www.phssr.org) of which the LSE is a founding partner, and will consider what these mean for health outcomes. The lecture will also reflect on what these developments can reveal about the future direction of health policy in other parts of the Middle East. Meet our speakers Professor Alistair McGuire is the Kuwait Chair of Health Economics at the Department of Health Policy and at the LSE Middle East Centre. Prior to this he was Professor of Economics at City University, London after being a tutor in Economics at the University of Oxford. Professor McGuire has also been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, the University of Sydney, the University of York, the Universitat of Barcelona and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona. George Wharton is Deputy Head of Department (Teaching) Department of Health Policy, with an academic background in International Relations (BSc, LSE) and Health Policy (MSc, Imperial). George’s work focuses on a broad range of themes in comparative international health policy. Meet our chair Katerina Dalacoura is Associate Professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Director of the LSE Middle East Centre. She held a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust between 2021 and 2024. The project findings will shortly be published as a book monograph by Cambridge University Press, under the title Islamic International Thought in Turkey: History, Civilisation and Nation.

Manar Alzraiy, a Palestinian education professional dedicated to resilience and equity in crisis-affected schools, brings together her colleagues from Gaza to talk about education since October 7 2023, how Israel's war on Gaza and forced displacement has destroyed the education sector, and what is needed to rebuild it both physically and intellectually. These interviews took place in the summer of 2025. Manar Alzraiy is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity and an education professional from Gaza, where she worked for ten years with UNRWA. At LSE, Manar conducted research on embedded inequalities in how United Nations humanitarian principles are applied in UN schools in Palestine. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr Alaa Ali Aladini is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction (TEFL). He has over 23 years of experience with UNRWA-Gaza, serving as an English teacher, educational supervisor and education specialist. Dr Aladini brings extensive expertise in language education, teacher training and inclusive education. Asma Mustafa is an English language teacher who received the title ‘Global Teacher of the Year 2020’ from the AKS Education Award in India, and the title ‘Palestine’s Innovative Teacher of the Year 2022’ for her applied eTwinning approach in English language teaching. Dr Mohammed Awad Shbeir holds a PhD in Educational Administration. He is also an education supervisor as well as an academic and educational researcher specialising in education and social issues. To find out more about Manar's work: https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/fellows/2023/manar-alzraiy.

Modern Syria has seen violence, repression, and autocracy, suffering through tragedy after tragedy over the past century. Yet the history of Syria is not just a tale of dictators and generals. From the 1800s to the 2020s, the Syrian people have engaged in a passionate struggle for justice, equality, and a better future. Whether fighting for national independence from French colonial rule, battling local landowning elites to share the country's wealth, or rising up against the Assad regime, the Syrian people have fiercely clung to their right to live with respect and dignity. Theirs is a story of protest and perseverance in the long fight to reshape the political destiny of their nation. Daniel Neep’s new book, A History of Modern Syria, offers a gripping narrative of how Syrians have navigated the events of the last two centuries. Never losing sight of the fates of ordinary people, it provides a comprehensive account of how a nation born in conflict sustained a rich, complex, and diverse society that after the fall of Assad will chart a new path into the uncertain future. Daniel Neep is Non-Resident Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, and Senior Editor at Arab Center Washington DC. He has taught Middle East politics at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the University of Exeter. He was previously Research Director (Syria) at the Council for British Research in the Levant and spent several years living in Syria and Jordan. He is also the author of Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and articles in journals including International Affairs, Journal of Democracy, New Political Economy, and the Journal of Historical Sociology. Meet our discussant and chair Charles Tripp FBA is Professor Emeritus of Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East, the politics of Islamic identities, and the role of art in the constitution of the political. He is currently working on a project on the politics of memory in Tunisia. Jasmine Gani is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory at LSE. She specialises in anti-colonial theory and history, and the politics of empire, race and knowledge production. She is author of 'The Role of Ideology in Syria-US Relations: Conflict and Cooperation' (2014), and co-editor of 'Actors and Dynamics in the Syrian Conflict's Middle Phase' (2022).

'Governance of Resistance in North and East Syria' examines the momentous development of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration since 2012. The creation of this unprecedented, ideologically radical entity is of immense significance in Kurdish, Syrian and Middle Eastern history and for discourses of nationalism and identity. This book presents new research from the expanding scholarship to interrogate Rojava as a political and social idea and explain the resistance narrative that underpins the ideology and governance structures. The contributions examine key aspects of the condition of the autonomous government, its successes, failures and impact, including the theory and nature of the political structures, their application in Arab areas, identity, education, gender and foreign relations. The findings demonstrate that North and East Syria has been revolutionary, that resistance there is resilient, and that there are constant and dynamic tensions between ideology and pragmatism in the evolution of this remarkable political and social project. The speakers at this event will also discuss fast-moving developments in north and east Syria. Meet our speakers Stephen Knight is a doctoral student at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. His ethnographic research explores the application of international humanitarian law by the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Outside of the field of law Stephen's research also looks at the interaction between mythology and political movements. Stephen also practises as a barrister, specialising in the interactions between criminal law, protest law, immigration law, and public law. He has forthcoming works in the fields of trafficking law and Kurdish mythology. Thomas McGee is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of legal and social studies of the Middle East, with particular emphasis on Kurdish dynamics in the Syrian context. He is a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and completed his PhD on “Syria’s Changing Statelessness Landscape: 2011 as Critical Juncture” at Melbourne Law School’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Thomas has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has previously published on a wide variety of topics in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Migration Review, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Genocide Studies International and the Kurdish Studies journal. Currently, Thomas is developing his PhD for publication as a monograph. Dastan Jasim is a Research Engineer at the Dauphine University in Paris and an Associate Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. Her research focuses on political culture, democratization and security studies. William Smith is an analyst and researcher whose work has focused on Syria since 2013. He was worked as an independent adviser on a number of U.K.-government and EU funded peacebuilding and stabilisation projects, including as the lead for a ‘Track 2’ initiative in northeastern Syria in 2021-22 that brought representatives of the SDF and Autonomous Administration together in dialogue with local civil society. He currently provides conflict analysis for a Syria humanitarian project.