On November 24th, Professor Diana Greenwald hosted Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Assistant Professor of Migration Studies and Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, for a lecture examining Lebanon’s long and complicated relationship with displacement. The lecture, anchored with Greenwald’s class, was open to the general public via a webinar, through which Diab attended as well.
Diab, whose award-winning research recently earned the Lisa Gilad Prize from the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) and the School of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Achievement Award, brings extensive expertise across the migration and development fields. She is a research affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and a senior associate on migration at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
Diab’s career has included roles at the American University of Beirut and Notre Dame University–Louaize, as well as visiting appointments at Brown University, Sciences Po Lyon, the University of Cambridge, and the University of London’s Refugee Law Initiative. She has completed more than 150 consultancies for UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, and governments across the Middle East.
Drawing on participatory, trauma-informed fieldwork, Dr. Diab shared insights from her work with internally displaced Lebanese families, Palestinian refugees from Syria, and other under-represented displaced groups. She explored how individuals make sense of refuge, loss, and uncertainty while navigating life in a state marked by political fragility. Moving beyond crisis-centered narratives, her talk highlighted the everyday realities of displacement — how people rebuild, imagine return, and negotiate the emotional and political burdens of living in prolonged limbo.
Diab also reflected on the ethical responsibilities of conducting research with communities experiencing layered vulnerabilities, highlighting the importance of documenting displacement with care and recognizing displaced people not as case studies but as experts of their own lives.
