Samuel Lee Dinger

SAMUEL DINGER, a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, received funding in April 2019 to aid research on ‘No Country for Young Men: The Lives and Livelihoods of Syrian Shab_b in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley,’ supervised by Dr. Gianpaolo Baiocchi. This research examines the processes through which the dilemmas of everyday life in exile contribute to the emergence of novel forms of moral community and ethical selfhood among young male refugees with no links to humanitarian NGOs. Specifically, it asks how masculine vocabularies, practices, and aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered life-course expectations around labor, domesticity, marriage, and family. The project consists of eighteen months of ethnographic research focusing on the ethical and interactional dimensions of everyday domestic and economic life among young and formerly middle-class Syrian men displaced by the civil war in their homeland. By combining life history interviews with ethnographic observations of young male refugees’ income-generating practices, social networks, and improvised domestic spaces, this research tests hypotheses regarding relationships between downward class mobility, separation from kin, unsettled future horizons and the emergence of distinct new forms of masculine moral community and identity.