XClose

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

Home
Menu

Dr Mai Taha

Dr Mai Taha is a Visiting Research Fellow from 1 September to 15 December 2025.

Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Mai’s research explores the different scales of revolution that draw out historical tensions arising in workers’ movements, feminist movements and anticolonial liberation movements. She has written on law, colonialism, labour movements, class and gender relations, and social reproduction in the Middle East. A selection of her publications include: Thinking through the Home: Work Rent, and the Reproduction of Society (2023); Human Rights and Communist Internationalism: On Inji Aflatoun and the Surrealists (2023); The Comic and the Absurd: On Colonial Law in Revolutionary Palestine (2022); and Law, Class Struggle and Nervous Breakdowns (2021). Using film, literature, the radio, and oral history, Mai is currently working on questions relating to labour, the home, anticolonial solidarity and revolutionary subjectivity. 

Project Description

I am working on a book project with Sara Salem, entitled: Sonic Lives: On the Radio and Anticolonial Solidarity. The book focuses on anticolonial sound, exploring the role of radio in liberation struggles across Africa and the Middle East from the 1950s to the 1990s, drawing out different maps of solidarity and internationalism.

The book, titled Sonic Lives: On the Radio and Anti-Colonial Solidarity, tells a story of anti-colonialism from the perspective of sound, asking how the sonic—read primarily through the radio—can be a valuable lens through which to trace the possibilities and contradictions of anticolonialism.  The book centres the radio to explore the role of the sonic in anticolonial struggle and the imaginative geographies of solidarity it created, both across Africa and the Middle East, as well as globally. It draws on multiple archives including sound archives, state archives, BBC radio monitoring archives and the archives of liberation movements. There has been little written about anticolonial histories through the lens of the sonic, as well as through the contradictions and tensions produced by anticolonial movements and postcolonial states, manifested in the book through the tension between state radios and the clandestine pirate radios. This book aims to address these gaps, asking how else we might write about a moment that was central to global history and the contemporary world that emerged at the end of European empire.