Marwa Bakabas is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology with a specialization in Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Global Affairs with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa from George Mason University (2011) and a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the American University of Beirut (2019). During her Master's, she conducted ethnographic research to understand the ways of dwelling and the life transformations through disaster faced by refugees living in a state of temporality in informal settlements in Lebanon and transit camps in Greece. Through volunteering and research, her work has focused on public and applied anthropology to promote awareness of the ongoing issues of violence and exile. Thus far, her research has included sea border crossings, humanitarianism, death & dying, the ageing population, memory, violence and the space of refuge. While working with refugees, she became inspired to study the conflict in Yemen and those who are facing similar distress. Her doctoral research will focus on building academic scholarship by shedding light in the context of the understudied population of displaced Yemenis.
Additionally, she is a Research Fellow on the DAAD Higher Education Dialogue with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München working on a publication called “Violence, Trauma and Exile: in the Arab World and Germany.”
