School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am an economic anthropologist: my research looks at the nexus of labour and different forms of migrations in global economies, particularly in the Middle East, and in the context of the Syrian conflict. I am also interested in rethinking research ethics for fieldworkers "beyond do no harm". Since 2015, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with refugees and migrants in Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, the UK, and Uganda, often together with refugee-led organisations.

Between 2022 and 2026, I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Edinburgh's Social Anthropology department. For my project "BROKERS OF DISPLACEMENT – An ethnography of the infrastructure of Syrian refugees’ circulations throughout the Mediterranean" (2022-25), I am currently conducting ethnographic research in Tunisia, Turkey, Jordan, and the UK. You can learn more about my research with refugee brokers in my 2023 article in Cultural Anthropology.

Between February 2024 and January 2025, I am also the principal investigator of the project Recycling Ruins: Refugee and Migrant Waste-pickers in Türkiye after the 2023 Earthquake, a collaboration with the Turkish non-profit cooperative Development Workshop and the Syrian-led organisation Syrian Academic Expertise. This project is funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Workshop Grant.

In 2026, I will start a permanent lectureship in Anthropology of Development, also in Edinburgh's Social Anthropology department.

Previous research

Before my PhD, I was a Junior Research Officer at the International Organization for Migration in Geneva between 2013 and 2014. I also gained working experience with the German Development Agency GIZ and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Germany, Jordan, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Between 2015 and 2019, I studied for a PhD in International Development in Edinburgh's Social Anthropology department. For my doctoral studies, I did fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Mafraq, northern Jordan, in 2016/17. Two articles that came out of my PhD were awarded the 2018 Contemporary Levant Prize for Best Article and the 2021 Best Article Prize of the Syrian Studies Association. In 2019, I conducted postdoctoral research with Syrian and Congolese youth in urban areas in Uganda and Jordan as part of a pilot study on adolescent refugees’ reproductive health. 

Between 2019 and 2022, I was a lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. Between 2020 and 2021, I was the Programme Director of the MSc International Development. 

In 2023/ 2024, I was the principal investigator of the project “Make them count! Supporting civil society action to improve refugees’ and migrants’ livelihoods in Sousse, Tunisia” (2023-2024), a collaboration with policy experts and humanitarian practitioners from the Mixed Migration Centre in Tunis and Association Tunisienne Awledna in Sousse. This project was funded by the Maghreb Action on Displacement and Rights Network Plus.

Since 2019, I have been involved in the University of Edinburgh's interdisciplinary OneHealth FIELD Network, of which I am now the deputy director. As a principal and co-investigator on various projects, with funding from the AHRC and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I have been conducting in-person and remote fieldwork with displaced Syrians in the Middle East together with humanitarian and cultural practitioners and academics from the Turkish non-profit cooperative Development Workshop and two Syrian-led organisations, Syrian Academic Expertise and Douzan Art & Culture. Learn more about my research about Syrian refugee labour in agriculture, food security and intangible cultural heritage in the Middle East here:

• SyrianFoodFutures (2019-2021)
• From the FIELD (2020)
• Refugee Labour under Lockdown (2020-2021)
• FIELD SONGS project  (2021-2023)
• Recycling Ruins: Refugee and Migrant Waste-pickers in Türkiye after the 2023 Earthquake (2024-2025)

Artistic outputs

I am very interested in creative and non-academic forms of engagement that can reach local policymakers and displaced people themselves.

For the "Refugee Labour under Lockdown" project, we used remote ethnographic research to document how working conditions and relationships with agricultural intermediaries and employers have changed for displaced Syrians in agriculture during the pandemic. One of the outputs of this project is the graphic novel "May God Bless the Hand that Works".

For the FIELD SONGS project, we produced a documentary, entitled "With the Sickle and Songs". Watch it here:

For a full list of publications, including Open Access Versions, please see Edinburgh Research Explorer