Deena Dajani

Deena has conducted ethnographic and participatory research with refugee and migrant populations in East Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and worked on multi-disciplinary projects building partnerships with civil society to work towards more inclusive urban spaces.

Deena is a researcher on the GCRF-ESRC project ‘Protracted displacement in an urban world’, a large-scale comparative study examining wellbeing and livelihoods in cities and camps in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Jordan and Kenya.

She is co-investigator on the British Academy project ‘Rethinking humanitarian aid for refugees as investment in urban water and sanitation’, a multidisciplinary project that brings together engineers and social scientists to investigate water technologies alongside the social relationships around water, including gender relationships and refugee-host relationships.

Deena is also co-investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Living in difference and in common: urban refugees and convivial cultures in Kenya’ that combines ethnographic research and film to document displaced people and civic actors’ practices and contributions to convivial culture in urban centres.