Kontakt
E-Mail:
judewafai@gmail.com
Background
Jude Wafai is a Syrian American from Chicago, Illinois who completed her undergraduate degree in pre-medical sciences and Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. In 2015, Jude moved to Lebanon to continue working with Syrian refugees, following the footsteps of her parents, physicians who volunteer in Palestine, Haiti, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan among other countries. Jude taught English and Math at a Syrian refugee school in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, before embarking on several different research projects and NGO initiatives concerning the psychosocial dynamics of exile, education systems for Syrian refugees, and the state of human rights in the Middle East after the "Arab Spring." She completed her Masters in Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and is now applying to medical school in hopes of combining her psychosocial experiences with biomedical expertise as a psychiatrist.
Research project
Jude's research project was founded on her personal experience as a teacher at a Syrian refugee school in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, while living in the community, hosted by the principal of the school and her family. Jude's research traces the psychosocial ramifications of participatory approaches to humanitarianism, particularly education systems for refugees, and their effects on a conceptualization of future-making. The project is informed by Didier Fassin's work on humanitarianism as a politics of life in congregation with Gregory Bateson's theory of the Double-bind. Her research is grounded in attention to the particular, tracing the story of one family's dual-experience as both humanitarian workers and Syrian refugees in Lebanon.