On Method: A Keynote by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

The lecture will take place from 1.45 to 3.00pm, please arrive at the Porters' Lodge (Sidgwick Avenue) and you will be directed over to the event venue. Thank you.

The Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network, in collaboration with the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, is delighted to welcome Yassin al-Haj Saleh, one of Syria’s leading contemporary writers and public intellectuals, to deliver the keynote lecture at its 2026 Annual Conference.

How are ideas formed, and what do we overlook when we treat intellectual work primarily as an activity of the mind?

Against the background of the Syrian struggle over the past fifteen years, this keynote reflects on method by reconsidering the relationship between thought, emotion, embodiment and lived experience. It explores how extreme experiences become available to thought, focusing on three experiential structures: privation, violation and confinement, and the affects associated with them.

What happens when some experiences resist conceptualisation, while inherited forms of knowledge become detached from experience? The lecture considers method as the difficult work of negotiating between the two: between what remains raw and not yet fully articulable, and forms of knowledge that have become separated from embodied and lived experience.

The keynote forms part of SARN’s 2026 Annual Conference, which brings together scholars and researchers to examine questions of knowledge production and its relationship to periods of profound social and political transformation.

About Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian writer and former political prisoner whose work engages with Syria’s politics and society, prison and atrocity, intellectual and cultural life, and contemporary Islamism. He is the author of nine books and a founding member of the Syrian cultural and political platform Al-Jumhuriya. He lives in Berlin.

Conference websites

Syria in Transition: Knowledge, Memory, and the Everyday Aftermath

SARN-UK - SARN 2026 International Conference

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