Aida Abbashar

Branwen was a Research Assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre project Roads as Tools for (Dis)connecting Cities and Neighbourhoods: a Soscio-spatial Study of Abu Dhabi. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and an MRes in Anthropology from University College London. Branwen lectures in Research Methods at Brunel University and teaches in Anthropology and Political Geography at University College London. She is also the co-founder of The New Ethnographer, a consultancy and blog seeking to improve and inform methods training in qualitative research. She is also the co-founder of the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective, a project that hosts lectures, seminars, and workshops for a global community of digital ethnographers.

Branwen’s interests and research are in refugee mobility and infrastructure. Her doctoral research was conducted in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where she looked at access to mobility through road, internet, and human infrastructures among Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers. Her work contributes to social scientific understandings of infrastructure in a colonial setting and seeks to problematise common assumptions about mobility in the West Bank. She is now developing a project exploring migration infrastructures on the Belarus-Lithuania border and their relation to refugee wellbeing.

Expertise

Anthropology, Refugee Mobility, Migration, Urban Infrastructure