Laboratory Lebanon

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Fieldwork conducted in summer 2023 in Lebanon, allowed us to engage with a diversity of creative practitioners and scholars, people who have been displaced and humanitarian aid workers, conservationists and educators, agronomists and farmers, among others to explore the notion of 'home,’ particularly as this takes shape within the context of persistent crises. Through site visits, interviews, conversations, walks, and other engagements, we explored the strategies and tactics that migrants, refugees, and Lebanese people use in creating a sense of home.

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Lebanon provides a unique context at a crucial and pivotal moment where there are waves of migration following a complete collapse of the government, economic and banking systems, healthcare system, along with many public and private institutions normally providing social support. This is coupled with a country hosting the highest per capita of refugees in the world. Grassroots, creative, and humanitarian interventions are emerging within chaos, destruction and overall collapse of civic and public services. We see this research as site-specific while also recognizing how, in dialogic terms, it is relevant for our collaborators in the US, Sierra Leone, Bulgaria, and Turkey, who will join us in Lebanon in 2024 for a series of engagements.

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Collaborating closely with local artists, people who have been displaced, and aid workers, we will host a series of workshops and making-based activities to generate speculative stories. This site-specific approach will leverage speculative and visionary fiction to offer alternatives to stories of dependency and structural vulnerability. In moving beyond stories of damage, resilience, and heroism, this transdisciplinary research asks: How might speculative storytelling play a role in initiating change and generating futures based in justice and belonging? How might we reimagine stories of stasis as those of transformation by asking what else is possible? What do future stories of mutuality, interdependence, and belonging look like? What would climate-resilient, planet-conscious, and regenerative aid look like? How might we respond to the slow violence surrounding communities in the face of ecological loss? How do we respond to what is invisible, unseen and fractured? What would the world look like if we put intergenerational justice and long-term thinking at the heart of policy and decision making?

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We thank the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility for their support of this ongoing project