Research

My work sits at the intersection of disability, displacement, and humanitarian action – where lived experience, theory, power, and policy collide. I am a critical and interdisciplinary researcher working primarily with children with disabilities and their families living in displacement in Lebanon, in close dialogue with national and international NGOs, organizations of people with disabilities, and UN agencies. At the heart of my research is a commitment to participatory, action-oriented methodologies that are trauma-informed, inclusive, and rooted in relationships. Inclusion and social justice are not only guiding principles of my scholarship, but values that shape my everyday life.

I try with my work to bring the experiences, priorities, and insights of people collaborating in the research process into conversation with concepts and theories drawn from multiple disciplinary traditions, including Critical Disability Theory, scholarship on forced migration and displacement, critical humanitarianism, and political philosophy – particularly through the work of Giorgio Agamben. This interdisciplinary dialogue allows me to question what is taken for granted in both theory, policy and practice, and to open spaces for alternative ways of thinking about disability, inclusion, and humanitarian response, within and beyond education in emergency interventions.

My research fundamentally challenges Western humanitarian conceptualizations of “inclusion” and the increasingly popular discourse of “disability inclusion”, especially as they are operationalized in contexts of emergency and conflict within the humanitarian sector. Much of the existing empirical literature remains technical, functional, and policy-driven, often leaving unexamined the power structures that shape humanitarian action. At the same time, the fields of forced migration/displacement, disability studies, and humanitarian education continue to be separated by disciplinary boundaries—reproducing ableist assumptions about movement and relying on Western framings of disability that fail to account for experiences in the Global South (see the work of Pisani and Grech, 2015). My work is intentionally located within these gaps, where contradictions persist and where critical, collaborative knowledge-production can open possibilities for more just and meaningful forms of inclusion.