Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty

As a recipient of this fellowship, I would focus full-time on the writing and completion of my book project: In Transit: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut, the only book-length anthropological investigation of everyday mobility practice available to date. The book makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary study of space, society, and power. While anthropology has focused extensively on experiences of migration and transnationalism, paying particular attention to the movement of people across borders and the connections they forge across geographical space, much less has been written about mobility in more literal terms. In its treatment of quotidian modes of getting around, the book thus delves into an underexplored realm of ethnographic inquiry. By tracking people's ordinary movements through the city -- for example, riding in taxis and buses, driving cars and motor scooters, and walking around security barriers -- I engage mobility as a lens for the understanding of various dimensions of social, cultural, and political difference in the Lebanese context, especially those shaped by class, status, national identity, and gender. I argue that seemingly unremarkable navigations of the city are in fact a crucial site for the production of an uneven urban citizenship.