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Estella Carpi is presently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Migration Research Unit, Department of Geography, University College London (UCL). She has also been a Research Associate at the Development Planning Unit (UCL) and Humanitarian Affairs Advisor at Save the Children-UK. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Sydney (Australia), with a study on the social response to humanitarian assistance provision in Lebanon. After studying Arabic in Milan and Damascus (2002-2007), she also worked as a researcher for the New York University (Abu Dhabi), Lebanon Support (Beirut), Trends Research & Advisory (Abu Dhabi), UN-Habitat (Beirut), the American University of Beirut, UNDP (Cairo), and the International Development Research Center (Cairo), mostly focusing on displacement, forced migrations, social welfare, women’s parity, and humanitarian aid provision in the Middle East. She has lectured extensively in the Social Sciences in Italy and Australia.
Bringing Social Class into Humanitarian Debates: The Case of Northern Lebanon
Cities are commonly regarded as the primary places where class economies become layered and articulated; however, the debates on “urban humanitarianism” have neglected social class as a key factor that significantly marks the relationship between aid providers and recipients in settings of aid provision. The small city of Halba, in northern Lebanon, vividly illustrates how the class economy has tacitly been shaping humanitarian programming and how the very presence of humanitarian actors on the ground reinforced the pre-existing class-based inequality.
Against Ontologies of Hospitality: About Syrian Refugeehood in Northern Lebanon
This essay explores the relationship between Syrian refugees and local Lebanese. In particular, it discusses the dominance of the discourse of ‘hospitality’ in the international media depiction of this relationship and in the humanitarian response informed by it. As this essay will show, these tendencies have resulted in the ‘hospitality’ discourse informing and reinforcing the international response to the Syrian refugee influx into and presence in Lebanon.
