Ian Morrison
- Position: Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology
- Department: Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology
- Email: [email protected]
Ian Anthony Morrison is an associate professor of sociology and chair of the Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology Department at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He holds a PhD in sociology from York University, an MA in political economy from Carleton University and completed early-stage training at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society. His research engages with questions of nation, identity, religion and political subjectivity through the use of critical and psychoanalytic theory.
His monograph, Nation, Crisis and Reproduction: Religion and National Identity in Québec (University of British Columbia Press), explores moments of crisis through which national identity, and consequently the nation, are reconstituted and reproduced. Morrison is currently the principal investigator of Extimaces: Critical Theory from the Global South, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 30th anniversary early career scholar program grant. In this role, he directs a global team of co-investigators examining how critical theory—an intellectual movement traditionally associated with European and North American cultures of thought—is received, transformed, contested, adapted and put into dialogue with cultures of critique situated in the global South.
Morrison also serves as an associate editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and on the editorial board of Dialogues in Sociology.
Morrison's research agenda includes several projects investigating two interrelated topics: national identity and rethinking citizenship. Each project aims to understand how group identity and political subjectivity are formed, governed and reproduced, and to create openings for the construction of alternative modes of belonging.
What is innovative in his approach is the focus on moments of crisis—moments when group identities or political subjectivities are perceived to be under threat. Moments of crisis reveal the limits of belonging within various conceptions of community and, crucially, the ways in which group identities are both reproduced and transformed in these moments.
Investigating moments of crisis provides an opportunity to illuminate the often arbitrary or silent assumptions underlying discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion, and allows for the development of alternative forms of community, belonging and being political.
- PhD, Sociology, York University (2008)
- MA, Political Economy, Carleton University (2003)
- BA, (Hons) International Affairs, University of Toronto (1997)