Welcome to my personal website

I am a social anthropologist researching revolutionary politics and subjects, religious imagination and migratory aspirations with a special focus on Syria and Turkey. In my current research (Leverhulme EC fellow) I explore the traces of mass political violence through the study of material, immaterial, corporal, acorporal, linguistic and artistic remains in Beirut, Lebanon. This project will lead to the collaborative creation of an oral archive and the production of a documentary film.

In my previous project (labEx HaStec) I studied the role of predestination and the figure of the martyr in the Syrian revolution and migration. During my previous fellowships I explored the genealogy of non-violence in Syria, focusing on the Darayya local council and Abdelakram al Saqqa’s halaqa; I also examined the disputed concept of hospitality and Syrians’ guest status in Turkey (American Ethnologist 2023).

In my doctoral thesis within the ERC Comparative Anthropology of Revolutionary Politics (CARP) I developed a project on the Syria revolution in displacement (UCL, 2019). This is the basis of my monograph ‘Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time, subjectivity’ (UCL Press, 2023), in which I analyse how the concept of ‘revolution’ is redefined by the Syrian experience, understanding it as a multi-dimensional and multi-scalar phenomenon that affecting Syrians’ lifeworld in all its layers.

My previous research on perspectivism and shamanism and the intermingling between things religious and political was based on fieldwork in Gornaya Shorya (Siberia). This was the topic of my MSc thesis in social and cultural anthropology (UCL, 2013). For my research masters in philosophy within the Erasmus Mundus ‘Europhilosophie’ programme in Brazil and Europe (2010-2012) I explored the relation between contemporary philosophy and anthropology as opening the possibility for decolonial practices and theories.

This led me to aim at de-centring Eurocentric concepts through close attention to the local concepts and practices. My work is, moreover, very much inspired by non-Western philosophies and epistemology that go against the heritage of the Enlightenment that is still very much prevalent in social sciences and humanities.

Research Interests