Seminar: Refugeedom’s subjects and subjectivities
Speaker: Dr Arek Dakessian (Queen Margaret University of Edinburgh)

RSC Seminar, 27 October 2021
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term 2021
Seminar convened by Dr Anne Irfan, Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration

About the speaker
Dr Arek Dakessian is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Global Health and Development (IGHD), Queen Margaret University of Edinburgh. He is a sociologist interested in cultural production, material culture, racialisations and refugeedom. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Casting Nets and Framing Films: An Ethnography of Networks of Cultural Production in Beirut” was a mixed-methods ethnographic exploration of filmmaking networks in his hometown drawing upon social network analysis (SNA). It engaged with how freelance filmmakers navigate the social network markets in which they operate, how they are co-produced by the films that they produce and, finally, the emergence of social worlds out of sustained on-set relationships and their spillover into life off-set. Arek is also a founding member of LIVED, an Edinburgh-based charity dedicated to researching refugeedom (www.livedprojects.org), as well as a member of the Social Network Analysis group of Scotland.

Photo credit: Empowerment through employment for Syrian refugee women in Jordan, Za’atari Refugee Camp, 2018. © UN Women/Christopher Herwig (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Refugeedom’s subjects and subjectivities | Dr Arek Dakessian

The Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) aims to build knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of forced migration in order to help improve the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.