Kristin Vanessa Monroe

KRISTIN V. MONROE, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, received funding in October 2019 to aid research on ‘Mobility and manhood across the Syrian Warscape.’ Two problems have dominated discourse about the Syrian war: how the violence is organized and how Syrians have coped with destructive capacities of the violence primarily through becoming refugees. This project is an ethnographic investigation of the lives of Syrians across a transnational warscape that aims to broaden these understandings of the long war in Syria by investigating forms of gendered mobility and social transformations the conflict has wrought. The project focused primarily on a study of the livelihood practices and mobilities of male cross-border taxi drivers from western Syria who have made a living over the last several years driving to and from Lebanon and have been currently caught up in myriad crises: Syria’s ongoing conflict, Lebanon’s economic collapse, a hardening of the Syrian-Lebanon border, and the global pandemic. A secondary research topic, which grew out of the data collected from male taxi drivers, concerns the marital mobilities of Syrian women who have traveled to Lebanon in taxis for wedding celebrations. Their grooms are Syrian men who, under the threat of forced conscription, did not want to enter Syria. Both the taxi drivers’ and brides’ experiences foreground the complex gendered politics of wartime mobilities and immobilities.