Independent Researcher

About

Géraldine Chatelard is a social anthropologist and historian of the contemporary Middle East.

After degrees in Arabic, English and sociology from the Sorbonne, she lived and conducted research in Jerusalem and the West Bank between 1991 and 1994. In 2000, she completed a Ph.D. in historical anthropology at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris with a doctoral grant from the Centre d'études et de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain (CERMOC) that allowed her to live and do research in Jordan from 1994 to 1999. Her work, awarded a prize as 'best dissertation in French on the Arab and Islamic world', was published in a book form in French in 2004 (Briser la mosaïque, Paris, CNRS Editions), and is to be published in English by Brill. It deals with evolving notions of tribal, religious, local and national identities in Jordan from the mid-19th to the late 20th Century based on a historical ethnography of Christian families in/from the town of Madaba set within a broader analysis of the history and politics of modern Jordan. It looks critically at the 'minority' and 'mosaic' paradigms that have dominated the analysis of non-Moslem communities in the Arab world.

Her interest in tribalism as a social form led her to undertake field research in arid areas of Jordan, Syria and the Algerian Sahara to study how pastoral nomads in transition adapt to new local and global contexts (projects of environmental and cultural heritage protection, development of international tourism, etc.). Linked to issues of changes in patterns of resource use in rural areas, she also looks critically at the introduction and application of the 'sustainable development' paradigm and at the emergence of environmental issues within development projects.

Her third area of research concerns international migration from Iraq since 1990 in a changing context characterised by more insecurity in Iraq and more restrictions on international mobility. She has analysed the interplay between, on the one hand, the policies of states and humanitarian organisations that constrain migrants' choices, routes, conditions and destinations and, on the other hand, the social networks and other strategies individuals and families use in their attempts to achieve their migration aims. Between 1998 and 2011, she researched Iraqi exiles, migrants and refugees in over ten different countries in the Middle East (Jordan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen) and Europe.

From 2001 to 2004, she was a post-doctoral Marie Curie Fellow with the Mediterranean Programme at the European University Institute in Florence.

Between 2006 and 2010, as a Research Fellow with the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Amman, she co-directed the research programme "Tanmia: Questioning Development as the Manufacture of Public Action in the Arab World"  (funded by a grant from the French National Agency for Research - ANR).

In 2010-2011 she was the Iraq Team Leader for the project "Refugeecooperation.org" led by the Middle East Institute (Washington) and the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (Paris).
See: http://www.refugeecooperation.org/