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About
Lucy Garbett is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where her research examines the relationship between administrative governance, property relations, and urban inequality. Her work has been published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, The Guardian, and Middle East Report (MERIP), and Archive Stories. She currently serves as the Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly journal published by the Institute of Palestine Studies. She previously served as co-president of the Graduate Section at the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES) from 2021-2024.
Key Expertise: Land, Property, Eastern Mediterranean, Political Geography, Urban Sociology, Racialisation, Political Economy, Bureaucracy, Ethnographic and Mixed Methods, Social Reproduction, Socio-Legal Studies.
Research
(Working) Thesis Title: Navigating Dispossession: Palestinian Life, Land and Property in Jerusalem.
Supervisors: Dr Sara Salem (Department of Sociology) and Professor Suzanne Hall (Department of Sociology)
Lucy Garbett's research investigates how administrative, legal and bureaucratic infrastructures shape property relations, urban landscapes, and social inequality, with a regional focus on Palestine and the broader Middle East.
Her doctoral dissertation, “Navigating Dispossession: Palestinian Life, Land and Property in Jerusalem,” examines how Palestinians navigate the bureaucratic systems that govern building, property ownership, and residency in the city.
Her broader research interests span political economy, infrastructural violence, social reproduction, social history and critical research methods. She is currently an Early Career Fellow on the Carnegie-funded project “Mapping Regional Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Arab World,” led by the Exeter University Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Arab Centre for Social Sciences, where she is conducting research on renewable energy development and land relations in the Middle East.