The CEDEJ Environment and Social Policies Seminar Series | Webinar 07 october 2020 at 5 PM

The series presents public interventions by scholars and activists researching the impacts of the compounded effects of financialization and overlapping crises on the right to housing at the local, national, and global levels.

Discussant and Session Chair
Agnès Deboulet

About Beirut Urban Lab:

The Beirut Urban Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research space. The Lab produces scholarship on urbanization by documenting and analyzing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and its region’s natural and built environments. It intervenes as an interlocutor and contributor to academic debates about historical and contemporary urbanization from its position in the Global South.

Kareem Rabie (American University)

Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, is forthcoming next year from Duke University Press. He trained in anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Prior to joining the faculty at AU, he was Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of Chicago. In 2014-15 Kareem was based at the University of Oxford as Senior Researcher and Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society; and Research Associate at the Oxford Programme on the Future of Cities. While at Oxford, he began research on circulation and the new economic geographies of Palestine/China trade.

Dalia Wahdan (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nile University)
Dalia Wahdan is an independent researcher working on urban issues. She was formerly an associate professor of urban studies at the Architecture and Urban Design Program, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nile University, Egypt, and a former Associate professor at School of International Studies at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME University), India. Wahdan specializes in urbanism in India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia focusing on new town planning, vulnerability in unplanned settlements, urban subjectivities, insurgent citizenship, and spatial inequities. Her publications include Planning Egypt’s New Settlements: The Politics of Spatial Inequities (Oxford University Press and Cairo Papers) and she is founder of Amaruna for Urban Studies, a private enterprise for research and policy analysis in Cairo.!

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. She is also a co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab, a recently established research center that engages policymakers, activists, and researchers in Lebanon and the region on questions of urban inclusion and post-conflict recovery. Fawaz also leads the urban track at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB (the Social Justice and the City program) and is a fellow affiliated to the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. She is the author of over 50 articles, reports, and book chapters investigating issues of housing, informality, property, law, and planning theory and pedagogy.

Discussant and Session Chair
Agnès Deboulet is professor of sociology at Université Paris 8, France, and the current director of the CEDEJ in Cairo, Egypt. Her research focuses on issues of globalization, city-dweller’s capacities to make the city and negotiate urban [based conflicts particularly in the popular districts of the Middle East and the Paris region (Ile de France). She is involved in several research projects exploring the entanglements of urban renewal processes, residential mobilities, and citizenship issues where she specifically focuses on precarious neighborhoods. She is the author of dozens of academic and popular articles, book chapters, and reports in French and English covering these issues.