Sam Dinger

Sam Dinger is an ethnographer, translator, and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University and a part-time faculty instructor in NYU’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study.
His research brings together theories and questions from urban sociology, Middle Eastern studies, and the anthropology of ethics to explore how the violence of war and exile produce emergent formations of masculine sociality and identity among young Syrian men in Lebanon. His doctoral dissertation follows a network of young Syrian men from the urban outskirts of Damascus as they endeavor to build and sustain lives in indefinite exile in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. Grounded in 18 months of ethnographic research and biographical interviews focusing on labor, exchange, leisure, and domestic space, this research explores how masculine vocabularies, practices, and future aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered life-course expectations around labor, domesticity, and family. More details about his work can be found at samueldinger.me.
Sam has worked within a number of transnational research initiatives including the Berlin–New York–London NYLON research network for critical cultural sociology and the Orient Institut Beirut. He is excited to apply critical and decolonial perspectives to the study of transnational migration as a participant in the GDC migration student working group.