School of Social and Political Science

Background

Regional: Palestine, Denmark, Refugees from SWANA now living in Scandinavia

Thematic Orientation: Violence, kinship, subjectivity, affect, trauma, ethics, distressing research

Empirically my early work centred on occupied Palestine. I have examined how those not so spectacular figures and relations in a conflict experience violent events as well as live with the uneventfulness of ongoing violence. For my PhD and early post doc research I did ethnographic fieldwork among family members to current and former Palestinian political detainees in Israeli aimed at documenting how they try to steer clear of the social stigma occurring with confinement.

I have recently finalised participation in the VELUX-funded HUM-PRAXIS research project 'Afterthoughts' led by PI Thomas Brudholm, Co-PI Birgitte S Johansen and PhD student Marie Leine, UCPH, Denmark (2022-2025) https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/afterthoughts/. Over three years our team collaborated closely with three practice-based organisations to address the ethical remainders in the wake of violence across survivors of torture and their personal and professional carers in Denmark.

Between 2014 and 2017 I was the PI of a comparative study on the Scandinavian Welfare states and how they encounter Middle Eastern survivors of Violence. The project was termed ‘Slippery Suffering’. Emphasis is placed on the affective responses to stories of violence among representatives of the welfare states (funded by NOS-HS). This research forms the backbone of my current book project Wounding Knowledge - Care, Ethics and Relationships after Torture (under contract with Fordham UP).

In sum, my research is animated by questions of violence, relatedness, everyday life, knowledge, as well as issues pertaining to gender and voice. My first book ‘No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine’ (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15492.html), is an ethnographic monograph about the porous boundary between endurance and exhaustion and, importantly, how kinship is the site par se in which such exhaustion is felt. Methodological questions of how to do ethnography among people in precarious situations informs the ethical sensibility with which I approach ethnography and collaboration more broadly. Through my research I have worked closely with NGOs and academic colleagues in Palestine, about research projects as well as consultancy work. In Denmark, I have co-operated with Dignity- Danish Institute against Torture for more than 15 years. I relocated from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark to the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Edinburgh early in 2019.

Based on my research I serve on a regular basis as an expert witness.

Global Collaboration

Since summer 2024 I have been part of the new Global Mental Health Collaborative , a global, Edinburgh-baed platform for collaboration among researchers and practitioners in the field of global mental health across the world (see examples of shared commentaries here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214109X25001111?via%3Dihub; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10986999/)

Between 2016 and 2019 I was part of the French -American research endeavour IPEV- International Panel on Exiting Violence as a member of the working group Reconstruction of the Self headed by Professor Richard Rechtman, EHESS. http://www.ipev-fmsh.org/. From 2021 I am part of the Network Les sciences sociales confrontées à la violence extrême also headed by Professor Rechtman.

Since 2017 I have been part of an international group of anthropologists and philosophers, investigating the relationship between concepts and life, and more broadly finding common ground between anthropology and philosophy, including scholars from EHESS and Sorbonne, France; Chicago and Johns Hopkins, US; University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; as well as the University of Edinburgh.

Between 2014 and 2021 I have served on the editorial board of the international journal Conflict and Society (Advances in Research, Berghahn) and Tidsskriftet Antropologi (Danish Journal of Anthropology). Together with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, I helped build the MAT Editorial Collective from 2020 to 2025 http://www.medanthrotheory.org/about/editorialTeam.

Selected publications

Segal, L. B (2023) Caring for the Ordinary in Palestine – When Ongoing Occupation Becomes Maddening. In Anthropological Quarterly 96:3 pp 437-460. 

Segal, L. B (2021) In the Know: Being with the Pain of Others in a Torture Rehabilitation Clinic. In In the Grip of Reality. Eds. A. Brandel and M. Motta. New York: Fordham University Press.

Segal, L. B (2018). Tattered Textures of Kinship: Living with Torture in Iraqi Families in Denmark. Medical Anthropology.

Segal, L. B. (2016). No Place For Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press. (Ethnography of Political Violence).

Segal, L. B. (2015). The burden of being exemplary: national sentiments, awkward witnessing, and womanhood in occupied Palestine. Royal Anthropological Institute. Journal, 21( Nr. Supplement S1).

Segal, L.B.: (2015)"Mourning, Grief, and the Loss of Politics in Palestine: The Unvoiced Effects of Military Occupation in the West Bank" In: Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Eds. Veena Das and Clara Han. Berkeley: University of California Press

Teaching

In Edinburgh I take great pleasure in teaching a variety of our core courses. I have convened Anthropological Theory and taught on Kinship: Structure and Process: Anthropology 1B Anthropology Matters; and Social Anthropology 2a: Key Concepts. Between 2020 and 2024 I have convened the course Culture and Mental Health in a Global Perspective, a course that is part of the MSc in Global Mental Health and Society which every year attracts a diverse group of students with a variety of professional and disciplinary experience with mental health and related fields.

In the academic year 25/26 I will lecture on the courses Introduction to Social Anthropology 1A; Kinship: Structure and Process, as well as Culture and Mental Health in a Global Perspective.

Research Culture

Together with Dr Sudeepa Abeyesinghe and Professor Peter Davies, I convene the forum Ethical Pressures on Thinking. This is an interdisciplinary reflexive space where researchers from across CAHSS come together to discuss the ethical pressures on thinking posed by methodological, collaborative, or conceptual dilemmas brought about through our research practice. We meet 2 times per semester organised around a theme suggested by our members (inheritance, truthfulness, evidence, knowledge, research with vulnerabie participants to name a few topics). Please get in touch with either of us if you would like to participatte and suggest a theme, the space is open for all, emphasising PhD students and ECAs.