Session Description:

Societies increasingly demand rapid adaptation. Accelerated change unfolds while the non-economic foundations of social life are strained, even as they are expected to provide stability and cohesion. The felt experience of being pulled away from familiar practices by forces that move faster than people can regain their footing is grounds for resistance. It is in that context that risk imaginaries respond to potential futures shaped by social losses that institutions cannot or will not repair. Musical resistance, exemplified in the legacy of Casablanca’s Nass El Ghiwane, demonstrates how public culture can reclaim direction and name dangers that rarely rise to public priority. The Ghiwani framing offers a lens for explaining how perpetual economic growth and market arbitration have marginalized lived experience and suppressed alternative shared understandings of societal risk.

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Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Salah Hamdoun is a Visiting Affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for African Studies. He holds a PhD in Innovation in Global Development from Arizona State University. His research traces community responses to rapid economic, technological, and social transformation through ethnographies of risk, resistance, and collective agency in Morocco and North Africa. His writing demonstrates how market forces can unsettle social fields and disrupt established forms of belonging, producing new kinds of uncertainty and a countermovement grounded in everyday practices that reshape development policy and public culture.