Lana Salman
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Lana Salman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and a scholar of international development and urban politics. Her research and teaching focus on everyday statecraft, social reproduction and urbanism in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in city and regional planning with an emphasis in global metropolitan studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Ghent University.
Her current book project is an ethnography and history of state-making from below from Tunisia's popular neighborhoods. It draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork on the peripheries of Tunis and the southern border regions of Tozeur and Kebili, including in women's living rooms, municipalities and the offices of a microfinance institution to think through questions of labour, politics and property post-revolution. Mobilizing a social reproduction framework, the book argues that settlement politics — how the urban poor negotiate inhabitation — consolidated local statecraft.
A second project examines social work, refuge and repair in Brussels and Beirut. It investigates if and how social workers working with unhoused Belgians and North African migrants in Brussels, and Lebanese and Syrian displaced populations in the aftermath of wars in Beirut, embody notions of care and work to provide refuge and repair life in the aftermath of migration and displacement.
Salman’s work is grounded in transdisciplinary inquiry and engaged research across the north-south divide.