Estella Carpi and Parastou Hassouri - Book talk: The Politics of Crisis-Making
This book talk will be hosted on Thursday, 16 May 2024 at 6:00 pm.
NVIC invites you for a book talk with Estella Carpi and Parastou Hassouri, centering on the former's volume The Politics of Crisis-Making: Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023).
In The Politics of Crisis-Making, by shedding light on how humanitarian practice becomes enmeshed with diverse forms of welfare and development, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises affect the social identity and membership of the displaced.
Her ethnographic research in Lebanon brings to light interactions among aid workers, government officials, internally displaced citizens, migrants, and refugees after the 2006 war in Beirut's southern suburbs and during the 2011-2013 arrival of refugees from Syria to the Akkar District (northern Lebanon). By documenting different cultures, modalities, and traditions of assistance, the book offers a full account of how the politics of crisis-making play out in Lebanon.
The Politics of Crisis-Making shows that it is not crisis per se, but rather the crisis as official discourse and management that are able to reshuffle societies, while engendering unequal political, moral, and nationality-based economies.
About the speakers:
Estella Carpi is a social anthropologist specialised in humanitarianism, identity politics and forced displacements, with a primary focus on Lebanon. She is an Assistant Professor in Humanitarian Studies at University College London. Before and after receiving her PhD from the University of Sydney (2015), she worked extensively for several research, policy, and academic institutions in Egypt (UNDP and IDRC), Lebanon (AUB and UN Habitat), Türkiye (Koç University) and the United Arab Emirates (NYUAD and Trends Research & Advisory). She also provides consultancies to NGOs on organisational safeguarding in vulnerable contexts.
Parastou Hassouri is an independent researcher and consultant focusing on refugee and migration law and policy. She has previously taught international refugee law at The American University of Cairo and has extensive experience in the field of international refugee law and refugee and immigrant rights and migration policy. Parastou has served as a consultant with different UNHCR operations in the Refugee Status Determination, Resettlement and Protection Units in Morocco, Turkey, Jordan, and the Russian Federation. She has served as a research consultant for NGO's including the Global Detention Project, where her research focused on migration-related detention in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Prior to that, as a consultant for Human Rights First, she conducted extensive research on the resettlement of Iraqi refugees out of the Middle East to third countries. She has worked as a Legal Advisor and Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Focal Point at Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in Cairo. She also occasionally writes on the topic of refugees and migration policy.
Attention!
The lecture starts at 6 pm. We work on a first-come, first-served basis as the number of seats is limited. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier when the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.
