S. A. Hosseini

S. A. Hamed Hosseini (Iran, 1970) is a sociologist. Senior Lecturer at The University of Newcastle, Australia, he works in the fields of the global social movements, global social problems, sociology of knowledge, and the political sociology of ethnic minorities in the West.

He has written articles and a book on the ideological aspects of global social movements including the ideological and cognitive transitions in the global justice movements.

Hosseini is a Faculty Associated Researcher at The Research Institute for Social Inclusion and Wellbeing (RISIW), and Humanities Research Institute (HRI), The University of Newcastle, Australia. He completed his PhD in Sociology and Global Studies (2006) at the Australian National University (ANU). Since 2003, he has been teaching at the Australian National University, University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, and the University of Newcastle. He has won research grants including the 2010 Bilateral Grant from the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

Research interests

His original research interests were in the political sociology of Iran and Islamist thoughts (the case of Dr Ali Shariati). This resulted in a series of articles published in an Iranian leftist magazine, Farhange Tose'eh (فرهنگ توسعه), through which he criticised the applicability of mainstream Western social theories in non-Western (particularly Muslim) societies like Iran. The demise of the 1990s Iranian reformist movement led by Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran (1997–2005) and the rise of a new conservative government were predicted by him. He explained this in terms of the movement's limits caused by its association with the urban middle class concerns and values; for their failure in paying attention to social justice and the class divisions; incapacity to communicate with the working and lower classes; adoption of structural adjustment policies; and inability to develop indigenised models for political and economic change. Through a number of articles he outlined a post-colonial Southern perspective in sociology based on the social ideas of Ali Shariati (1933–1977) (a Muslim reformist and the leading intellectual figure behind Iran's 1979 revolution whose ideas became once again a source of inspiration for Iranian democratic movements in the late 1990s and 2000s).

His PhD research at the ANU was in the area of social movements, focusing on the so-called anti-globalization movement (global justice or alter-globalization movement). This resulted in Alternative Globalizations (2010),[1] a book which set out the main ideational features of the movement and developed a new way of theorising the (trans)formation of ideas, identities, and solidarities in globalised social movements. His recent studies and publications have contributed to Social Sciences by developing new concepts such as accommodative consciousness, interactive solidarities, activist knowledge, social nexuses of inequality, ideological visions, transversal cosmopolitanism. It provides researchers in the areas of social movement and social ideation studies with a new integrative approach which accommodates major theoretical disputes.

Research Areas

Research over the last twenty years has focused on three main areas.

Global Social Movements

Research resulted in a series of journal article and a book on the ideational aspects and ideological transformations in the global justice movement (so-called anti-globalization movement) in the period between 2001 and 2010.

Global Issues and Complexities

Both undergraduate and postgraduate courses are taught by Dr S A Hosseini address the consequences of economic and financial globalisation for human welfare including health, education, democracy, human rights, justice, etc.

Political Identity, Identity Politics and (Post-)Islamist Movements

In recent years, Hosseini has led three research projects on "Identity Politics of Islamism and the Young Muslims' Political Identity in Australia: A Preliminary Qualitative Study”(2010, granted by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia); “Political Islam and the Formation of Political Identity among Young Muslims in the West: A Comparative Study of Australian and Canadian Cases” (2009 – funded by the University of Newcastle); “The Rise and Demise of Islamist-Market Fundamentalism in Iran: an economic sociological account of public policy in Post-Cold War Iran” (2009). He defines 'political identity" as such: "the 'realization' of Self as a 'political subject' (individual and/or collective) in relation to other Subjects and institutions." [2]

Cosmopolitanism and Transversalism

In his recent article Occupy Cosmopolitanism (2013),[3] Hosseini introduces the new concept of Transversal Cosmopolitanism or Transversalism to both social movement studies and cosmopolitanism literature. According to him, the recent uprisings in the Middle East, Europe, Turkey, North America and Brazil, in response to the failures of post-GFC policies, manifest the rise of a new cosmopolitanist vision which is not only based on the recognition of the Other but also on collaborative and collective learning and reflexivity. He writes (2013, p. 428):

"Conventional cosmopolitanism is fed by globalist imaginations. In reality, however, the ways in which ideational transformations can happen—as the result of inter-contextual transmissions—are so diverse that we can hardly theorize them under standardizing notions such as globalization. Transversalization, in contrast, refers to the ways in which this plurality is evolved out of interactions between conflicting grand processes such as liberalization, globalization,localization, Americanization, Balkanization, polarizations. Whereas some of these social changes and processes at the global level may lead to hybridization in some local contexts,others can cause fragmentation, conflict, marginalization, homogenization, or a mixture of these results in other contexts. Therefore, transversality must be defined as a quality produced through the interaction between such grand processes. Understanding transversality, according to new theoretical developments, requires the employment of dialectical imagination, acknowledgment of complexities, and the adoption of accommodative approaches (Hosseini, 2006).Globalism is defined by R. T. Robertson (2003, p. 4) as a conscious process of globalization.Similarly, we may define transversalism as a conscious effort to lessen disparities, achieve equity, avoid violence, and enhance autonomy and democracy by creatively crossing (or redrawing)boundaries that mark politicized divisions (Cockburn and Hunter, 1999). Transversalism,both in theory and practice, aims to realize the necessary condition for all parties involved in transversalization processes to benefit mutually, receive equal recognition and representation, and finally become able to determine their destinies in their new conditions."

Recent Publications and Conferences

References

  1. ↑ Hosseini, S. A. (2010) Alternative Globalizations: An Integrative Approach to Studying Dissident Knowledge in the Global Justice Movement (Milton Park; New York: Routledge).
  2. ↑ Hosseini, S. A. H. (2013). "'Political Identity' of Muslim Youth in Western Diaspora: Towards an Integrative Research Agenda". Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. 33 (4): 464–476. doi:10.1080/13602004.2013.866348.
  3. ↑ Hosseini, S. A. (2013) Occupy Cosmopolitanism: Ideological Transversalization in the Age of Global Economic Uncertainties, Globalizations, 10(3), pp. 425–38.
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