Sam Dinger is an ethnographer, translator, and sociologist. His research, based on two years of fieldwork in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley, focuses on the everyday lives of a group of young Syrian men from the urban outskirts of Damascus as they work to build and sustain lives in exile. He uses ethnographic methods and life-history interviews to explore how forced migration and exile reconfigure their gendered definitions of self and morality, experiences of agency, and orientations towards the future.
His writing has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Humanity, Contexts, and the edited volume Refugees as City-Makers. His research has received fellowship support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Weber Stiftung, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Prior to joining XE, he was a Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice at the NYU Gallatin Urban Democracy Lab where he also teaches the research tutorial for a community-based learning fellowship that supports urban social justice organizations in New York City. In 2022, Sam received the NYU GSAS Dean's Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in the social sciences.
Sam received his MA in Sociology from NYU (2018), his BS from Georgetown University in International Politics and Arab Studies (2011), and completed advanced Arabic language training at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA).
sld366@nyu.edu