I defended my PhD in May 2016. Before embarking on my postdoc in Lebanon in November 2016, I spent a few months looking for jobs and working on publications (you can check the most recent ones here and here). Among these was one article that tells the main story of my PhD, and that I planned to submit to the journal Antipode. It tells the story of how a large amount of capital found its way into Lebanon’s real estate and banking sectors after the global financial crisis of 2008, constituting a direct and indirect “spatial fix,” a term by David Harvey that I’ve discussed before.

During my postdoc, I worked on a draft and submitted it in June 2017. Five months later, I got four peer reviews back, and the news that I should do major revisions. The peer reviews were quite helpful in getting the article into better shape, and even though I was self-employed by then, I spent many hours revising the article and getting it into shape. I resubmitted it at the end of April 2018.

In July, I got four more reviews back from the same reviewers. While they were very satisfied with the revisions, some wanted me to engage more with the theory. At this point, it had been over two years since I defended my PhD. I decided that I would no longer spend time on the article and retracted it after mulling over my options for a few months. The people at Antipode were very nice about it and I decided to publish the article on my blog, to make it freely available to everyone interested in the story of my PhD. Please download it here or read it below! Anyone who can spot an error gets a free copyedit (up to 5,000 words)! An author can’t do her own proofreading 🙂

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Last month, two articles that had been in the making for a while (welcome to the world of academic publishing) finally came out in the journal CITY. I authored one of them by myself, an opinion piece that constitutes my final two cents on the entire postcolonial urbanism debate in the context of gentrification and rent gaps. A friend has likened it to me putting a chainsaw to some of the postcolonial critique, so do read it if you enjoy polemics! The other article was co-authored with the formidable Dr. Mona Fawaz and Daria El Samad, and discusses the relationship between gentrification and property using the case study of the Mar Mikhael quarter in Beirut.

The single-authored article is called “Gentrification and the creation and formation of rent gaps” and free e-prints are available here and on my Academia page.

The co-authored piece is titled “A property framework for understanding gentrification. Ownership patterns and the transformations of Mar Mikhael, Beirut” and has free e-prints available here. If these run out (only 50 are provided), contact me via email or Twitter to request a copy.

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In October last year, I published a blog post with tips for staying mentally healthy as a PhD-student. You can find the original here. I wrote it for the blog Pubs and Publications, a great resource for PhD-students, by PhD-students.

“The mental health of PhD-students is an increasing cause for concern. A recent study conducted in Belgium found that one third of PhD-students was at risk of developing a common psychiatric disorder like depression. Unfortunately, this does not surprise me. The rise of mental health problems among PhD-student populations has been attributed to increasing job insecurity, pressure to deliver results before the PhD is finished, and the isolation that comes with having to produce a dissertation by oneself. While I cannot present easy, clear-cut solutions to these problems, there are ways to decrease your risk of developing mental health problems, and to ensure that you seek help in time. I, for one, wish I had known these things when I started my PhD! Continue reading →