she/her, settler

noura nasser

noura nasser is an independent researcher and scholar. Her work focuses on migrant domestic workers, both live-ins and live-outs, in the wake of the kafala system. She explores how migrants deliberate and make meaning via food cultures, urban sensemaking in the wake of complex power configurations in the city of Beirut, its margins and beyond. She then considers the transnational migration of food, its circulation as an object, identity, nostalgia to trace humanity and dignity in such urban food spaces. Her research aims to intervene in the migrant domestic work literature and focus through the optics of food to re-examine power relations and think about the historicity of the kafala system, the formation of subjectivities under conditions of austere governance and violent states of living where labour is precarious and measures controlling their movement can gesture towards alternative individual and collective cultural and geographic imaginaries of being in which migrants situate and orient themselves into futures of possibilities of being recognized in the meantime.