CRS/IMS Seminar: Lives Outside the Return Story: Syrian Refugees and the Contested Temporality of Homecoming

September 25, 2025

10:00 - 11:30am (Toronto)

5:00 - 6:30pm (Beirut)

This is a virtual event

Zoom: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/XFbiPfaDRD-1gwt7KGFVqg

Guest Speaker: Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Director, Institute for Migration Studies, Lebanese American University, Beirut 

Discussant: Dr. Michaela Hynie, Interim Director, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University

Abstract:

Dominant debates on Syrian refugee return still presume that regime change will trigger mass repatriation and that refugees weigh formal, “objective” information to make a clear-cut choice. This talk challenges those assumptions by highlighting groups in Lebanon who are largely invisible in policy and media narratives of return—queer Syrians, female-headed households, widowed elderly women, Palestinian refugees from Syria, and socio-economically privileged “waiting classes.” Drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted at the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, it shows how these communities inhabit protracted displacement as an open-ended process rather than a single decision point. Their trajectories reveal how gendered, classed, stateless, and diasporic positions complicate both the meaning and timing of “return,” and how trust-based, affective knowledge often outweighs formal humanitarian or state messaging. Focusing in particular on the politics of stuckness faced by Palestinian refugees from Syria, the presentation underscores how for many, going “back” would merely mean re-entering conditions of exile. By centering these under-represented perspectives, the talk reframes return as an ongoing negotiation of vulnerability, privilege, and agency—less an act of closure than a continuum of provisional, investigative, and circular movements.

Bio:

Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/هي) is the director of the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an assistant professor and coordinator of Migration Studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity (CMI). In 2025, her research was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize from the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), as well as the School of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Achievement Award. She is a research affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, a global fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and a senior associate on migration at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP).