My research interests are mainly within the anthropology of migration, with a special focus on refugees and diasporic practices. I am also interested in social memory, gender and home in relation to violent political conflict and flight. My most recent research focuses on the encounters between newly arrived Palestinian refugees and staff at the Swedish Public Employment Service. I am in particularly interested in how the refugees’ experiences of violence are dealt with in those meetings and in the moral issues and bureaucratic strategies that emerge.
I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Gothenburg. My doctoral thesis from 2009 builds on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. In short, the thesis dealt with the many ways that the camp inhabitants tried to maintain continuity, morality and a normal order despite repeated emergencies during the second intifada. I have also done research about Danes and Swedes with a Palestinian background and their diasporic practices, while being a post doc at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. In addition, I have carried out fieldwork in UN-run schools for Palestinian refugee children, focusing on processes of gendered identity formations. I have also worked as a researcher and teacher at the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University.