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My guest today is Maytha Alhassen.
Dr. Maytha Alhassen (dr. maytha ميثاء الحسن) is a writer, producer, journalist, professor, and Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow, authoring the Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them (2018) report. She has appeared as a co-host on The Young Turks’ main hour, as well as a guest co-host and digital producer on Al Jazeera English’s The Stream. Alhassen is the co-executive producer, writer, and social impact advisor for Hulu’s award-winning series Ramy; a lecturer in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford; a 2021–2024 Harvard Religion and Public Life Fellow in Art + Pop Culture; Executive Producer of the docuseries American Muslims: A History Revealed; a Pillars Muslim Narrative Change Fellow; a USC 2022–23 Civic Media Fellow; host of the educational web series Key Terms (part of the Office Hours series); co-host of Amazon Music and SALT Audio’s meditation podcast Become; and a former TED Resident (2017).
In 2012, Alhassen co-edited the collection Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions. She has also written for CNN, Boston Review, HuffPost, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, Mic, and CounterPunch. Alhassen has appeared on CNN, HuffPost Live, Fusion Network, and WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. From 2019 to 2020, Alhassen served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and International Studies at Chapman University and as an Associate Professor teaching graduate courses in social justice and community organizing at Prescott College. As a social justice organizer, she helped launch abolitionist organizations and collectives including the Social Justice Institute at Occidental College, the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, Believers Bail Out, and Arabs for Black Lives.
Alhassen received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC, a B.A. in Political Science and Arabic and Islamic Studies from UCLA in 2004, and an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2008. While at Columbia, she conducted research for the university’s Malcolm X Project and facilitated arts-based workshops with incarcerated youth at Rikers Island through the Blackout Arts Collective. Alhassen has decades of experience in education, arts-based social justice organizing, media and journalism, global travel, healing practices—including yoga, Reiki, doula work, and meditation—and poetry writing and performance.
I love when a conversation on Urgent Futures feels truly hybrid—that my guest has an irrepressibly curious mind and expansive practice. This is one such conversation. Dr. Alhassen weaves together her committed practices as a writer, historian, activist, academic, and somatic teacher (among others…see her bio). To try to sum this up in a pithy context paragraph would be a fool’s errand, so please just enjoy the conversation.
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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode on the geopolitical crisis with Adames Global:
