Dalia Zein

I currently hold a postdoctoral research position at Tampere University as part of the ERC-funded project HOMCRI 'Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence' (PI: Mikko Joronen). I am Affiliated with the Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP), Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), and Social Anthropology Researchers (SAR). My current research examines through the notions of un/homing, detachment, and ruin the ways in which the Southern Lebanese dwell in material and affective ways with the loss of their homes and villages during the ongoing Israeli war on Lebanon (2023-). I was previously awarded a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology of Development from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. My doctoral research investigated the ways in which migrant domestic workers give new meanings to the city spaces of Beirut. Through an intersectional Feminist lens, I looked at how in these spaces the private and public binary is negotiated, how places are made, and how the body dialogues with the city. My interest in urban and spatial questions stems from my former professional training as a landscape designer and my 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. 

Ruination, home and unhoming, affect, domesticity and domestic work, migrant labor, the city, placemaking, intersectionality, Beirut, South Lebanon.

Political Geography, Feminist Theory, Anthropology of Space and Place, Urban Anthropology and Geography, Middle Eastern Studies, Migration Studies. 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Zein, D. & Joronen, M. (forthcoming 2027) “Dwelling with loss: (Un)homing amputations and ambivalent detachments of war in South Lebanon”, Geopolitics.

Zein, D. (forthcoming 2026) “Bad Feelings, Bad Anthropologist? Idealized archetypes among anthropology graduate students”, Ethnography.

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

Zein, D. (forthcoming 2026) “Gendered Hierarchy within Feminized and Racialized Labor: Space and Migrant Domestic Work in Lebanon” in Gender(ed) Labor. (Eds) Swiss Association for Gender Studies. Geneva and Zurich: Seismo Press Gender Issues.

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.