Post-Doctoral Researcher

The Policy and Time Strand in the Rights for Time Project is seeking to recruit a research assistant to work on refugee histories and temporalities in Lebanon (research team: Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, Dr. Tamirace Fakhoury, and Dr. Ben Warwick) Rights4time is a research network funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) consisting of multiple interdisciplinary projects across Kenya, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Rwanda. The network aims to bring the hidden legacies of conflict directly into humanitarian protection, and human rights policy and practice. The research assistant will be affiliated with the Centre for Lebanese Studies in Beirut.

Description of the research project: Refugee Histories in Lebanon: spaces between past and future.

How have the different times of refugee history shaped the Lebanese land and people scape since 1943? The policy and time strand in the GRCF project Rights for Time will compare and contrast the times of international and human rights law, local and regional policy, humanitarianism, and war with the lived, remembered, and imagined times of different refugee communities. It will explore the historical legacies and perceptions that have informed the crafting of Lebanon’s politics of reception towards refugee communities. At the same time, it aims to understand how refugee policies interact with broader social and cultural settings and how such policies are constructed along a continuum of perceptions and communal imaginaries, that are accumulated across time. Sociologically and historically, the project interrogates the temporal commitments of politics, of law, of outsiders, and of calls to ‘action’. From an arts perspective, it also addresses the undisclosed poetics of refugee temporalities. The anticipated impact of this case study is to inform multiple stakeholders as to why policy scripts and imaginaries often clash with local realities and explain how engaging with context-based temporalities informs policy solutions that are more attuned to realities.

Key questions that our research will address are

• How are temporalities of refugee crises constructed and how does governance rely on the past and the future to craft refugeehood through a crisis lens?

• How do temporary calls for action and policies made in the ‘here and the now’ shape refugee histories?
• What new conceptual, interdisciplinary protocols and policy tools allow practitioners and communities to see beyond those time tunnels?

Requirements

Anticipating an interdisciplinary methodology, we welcome applications from legal historians and theorists, historians, literary critics and theorists, art historians, historians, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists and political theorists.  Required: PhD, promising publication record appropriate to postdoctoral level, English, Arabic.

Key responsibilities

• Work closely  with the research team led by Dr. Tamirace Fakhoury, Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge and Dr. Ben Warwick
• Support in data analysis, archival research and literature reviews
• Support in writing reports and academic papers
• Reach out to various policy makers, civil society actors, artists, academics, practitioners, and refugee centric organizations
• Assist the team on other related tasks such as writing concept notes, hosting webinars, workshops and conferences

Requirements

Anticipating an interdisciplinary methodology, we welcome applications from legal historians and theorists, historians, literary critics and theorists, art historians, historians, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists and political theorists.  Required: PhD, promising publication record appropriate to postdoctoral level, English, Arabic.

Key responsibilities

• Work closely  with the research team led by Dr. Tamirace Fakhoury, Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge and Dr. Ben Warwick
• Support in data analysis, archival research and literature reviews
• Support in writing reports and academic papers
• Reach out to various policy makers, civil society actors, artists, academics, practitioners, and refugee centric organizations
• Assist the team on other related tasks such as writing concept notes, hosting webinars, workshops and conferences