Wendy Pearlman

Testimonials and the Lived Experience of Politics: We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

Wendy Pearlman

Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

September 22, 2017 12:00PM Millikan Room, E53-482

Testimonials and the Lived Experience of Politics: We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

What can ordinary people’s stories teach us about the processes underlying authoritarian resilience, protest mobilization, and political violence? Since 2012, Wendy Pearlman has probed these questions through open-ended interviews with more than 300 displaced Syrians across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Her new book, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria uses these interviews to chronicle the origins and evolution of the Syrian war solely through the words of ordinary people transformed by its unfolding. It explores how Syrians’ individual narratives coalesce into a collective narrative whose arc paints a portrait of silence and intimidation under an oppressive regime before 2011, expresses the transformative experience of individuals’ participating in protest against that regime, conveys the resilience of communities enduring unspeakable violence thereafter, and offers a window into the challenge of becoming and being a refugee. Upon sharing selections from the book, Pearlman will conclude with lessons about how storytelling can enrich the study of politics, and vice versa. She proposes that writing at the intersection of these two ways of understanding can bridge the divide between academic research and public conversations.

Bio: Wendy Pearlman is the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she specializes in the comparative politics of the Middle East. She is the author of three books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins 2017), Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003).