No Country for Young Men: the Lives and Livelihoods of Syrian Shebab in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This research examines the processes through which the dilemmas of everyday life in exile contribute to the emergence of novel forms of moral community and ethical selfhood among young male refugees with no links to humanitarian NGOs. Specifically, it asks how masculine vocabularies, practices, and aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered life-course expectations around labor, domesticity, marriage, and family. The project consists of eighteen months of ethnographic research focusing on the ethical and interactional dimensions of everyday domestic and economic life among young and formerly middle-class Syrian men displaced by the civil war in their homeland. By combining life history interviews with ethnographic observations of young male refugees? income-generating practices, social networks, and improvised domestic spaces, this research tests hypotheses regarding relationships between downward class mobility, separation from kin, unsettled future horizons and the emergence of distinct new forms of masculine moral community and identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

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Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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