Fleeing from the Syrian war through transit and resettlement countries from Lebanon to Turkey to Greece, the Balkans and Germany, refugees created fluid, emergent, ephemeral “post-structural structures” for pooling and exchanging resources, especially information, as they moved through a range of landscapes. This presentation, based on an ethnography of five middle aged sisters’ trajectories away from their homes in Damascus between 2012 and 2017, investigates how the exigencies of their flight, especially their perilous crossing of the Aegean, challenged their understanding of arborescent, patriarchal kinship and used new cell phone based technologies to scaffold their journeys towards Europe.
Leila Hudson is an anthropologist and historian and is Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, where she teaches courses on gender, political economy, media, conflict and migration in the Arab and Islamic world. She has published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics from Islam and late Ottoman Syria to contemporary Arab culture and media. Her books include Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City (IB Tauris 2008) and Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring (Palgrave MacMillian, 2014). She is currently writing an ethnography of the Syrian migration which follows five adult sisters and their families as they fled from Syria to Germany between 2012 and 2018.
The talk is cosponsored by the Global Mediterranean Working Group, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Humanities Institute's Global Mediterranean Project.
