Mobilized: Labor and Political Mobilization Between Sudan and Lebanon
My book manuscript, based on years of multi-sited ethnographic and oral historical research with intergenerational migrant communities in Lebanon and with their families in Sudan, tells a transregional story about migrants’ political organizing in Lebanon before and during Sudan’s December 2018 revolution. The project examines how the political and economic crises in both countries provoked a migrant-led movement for return. The book ends by following the new politics of exile from Sudan’s current war, asking, what is the exile’s relationship to the revolution?
Khartoum, January 2020 (author’s photos)
Sex and the Civil War
This project examines the economic role of sex in Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), and asks what happens to intimacy in a context of violence. Based on oral history interviews with former militia members and with civilian women, and my reading of Lebanese war-time novels and visual media that depict the integration of sex and violence in the war, I examine how militias used transactional and coerced sex to extract and control.
Map of downtown Beirut 1960s
Still from “Cinema Fouad” (Mohammed Soueid, 1993)