About me
Dalia Zein is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University. She is part of the ERC-funded project HOMCRI 'Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence' (PI: Mikko Joronen) in which she focuses on Lebanon as a case study looking at various material and affective ways of living with crisis, namely urban gardening initiatives and centers that support mental health that came forth as an outcome of the infrastructural and economic collapse that the country has been facing since 2019. Her former research, within the frame of her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,Geneva, looked at the ways in which migrant domestic workers give new meanings to the city spaces of Beirut. From an intersectional feminist lens, she investigated how in these spaces the private/public dichotomy is negotiated, how places are made, and how the body dialogues with the city. Dalia's interest in urban and spatial issues stems from her initial background in landscape design and her extra´-academic experience working in the urban development sector with the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service at the American University of Beirut, and UN-Habitat, Beirut. She is affiliated with the Space and Political Agency Research Group at Tampere University and the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.
Research topics
Placemaking, home and homemaking, urban gardens, feminist political ecology, the private and public, urban space, migration, domestic work, mental health, Lebanon
Research fields
Urban Geography, Feminist Geography, Political Geography, Anthropology of Space and Place, Urban Anthropology
Selected publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Zein, D. (2022) « Performance et exclusion: la place du corps au sein du mouvement intersectionnel des travailleuses domestiques au Liban » L’Homme & la Société 1(214-215) 161-190.
Zein, D. (2020) “Embodied Placemaking : Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers’ Neighborhood in Beirut”, Mashriq & Mahjar : Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Migration Studies 7(2) 69-99.
Chapters in Edited Books
Balazs, R. & Zein, D. (2019) “Social Cohesion vis-à-vis Spatial Division: the Contradictions of Participatory Design” in Aelbrecht, P. & Stevens Q. (eds) Public Space Design and Social Cohesion: an International Comparison. London: Routledge, 78-97.