Professor Dawn Chatty
Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She is also Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth; tribes and tribalism; nomadic pastoralism and conservation; gender and development; health, illness, and culture. She has worked with nomadic pastoral groups in Lebanon and Syria since the mid-1970s and extended her research to Oman in 1979. She has continued to work with these communities and has engaged in advocacy for the rights of these people to remain mobile and to resist forced settlement. In 1995, when she joined the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, she began an additional line of scholarly inquiry, the coping strategies and agency of refugee youth in prolonged conflict. She has worked with Palestinian youth in the five UNRWA field sites: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. She has also worked with Sahrawi refugee youth in Algeria and Spain and Afghan refugee youth in Tehran and Mashad, Iran. She is currently working with displaced Syrians in the neighbouring countries of Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.
She has edited numerous books including:Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East, Berghahn Books, 2010; Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century, Leiden, Brill, 2006; Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East, Berghahn Books, 2005; and Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development Berghahn Press, 2002.
She is the author of Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East Cambridge University Press, 2010, From Camel to Truck, White Horse Press, 2013, and Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State, Hurst Publishers, 2018.
Dawn was elected President of CBRL in December 2022. Dawn’s association with CBRL is much longer as she was CBRL’s Honorary Secretary from 2012 to 2017 and previously served as an Ordinary Trustee on the Board.