Samar Kanafani is a social anthropologist residing and working in Beirut. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester (UoM), with a dissertation entitled Made to Fall Apart: An Ethnography of … in Beirut, about the tactics of dwelling and deliberations over property and place at the interstice between urban decay and gentrifying renewal. Her article “On Deference and Benevolence,” about the politics of parking in Beirut, appeared in the Arab Studies Journal in 2017, while "Leaving Mother-land: the Anti-Feminine in Fida'i Narratives," on masculinity and Palestinian liberation fighters, appeared in Identities in 2008 and was based on her MA research. She co-edited a special issue of Contemporary Levant titled “Ethnography as Knowledge in the Arab Region” (2017). She co-founded in 2019 the Ethnography and Knowledge Production working group, under the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS). During 2017-18, she was an ACSS Early Career Fellow in affiliation with the Social Justice in the City program at the Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut AUB, where she has also taught. During 2019, she was a Postdoctoral Research Association with the British Academy, in affiliation with AUB and the Institute of Global Prosperity at UCL. Her ongoing research deals with urban renewal, urban decay, gentrification, critical heritage, collectivization, and the tactics of dwelling under overbearing conditions.
