Dr Haya Al-Dajani,

Associate Professor (Reader) in Entrepreneurship, Plymouth Business School, University of Plymouth

Haya’s research focuses upon the intersectionality of gender, entrepreneurship and displacement, and their collective impact on sustainable development. She is currently the Principal Investigator of two RCUK funded projects focusing on entrepreneurship and refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.  She is a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Small Business Journal and the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship. Haya also co-chairs the Gender and Enterprise Network – a Special Interest Group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Dr Nibedita S. Ray-Bennett,

Associate Professor,University of Leicester

Nibedita’s research focusses on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and international development. For the first research strand, she has focused on caste, class and gender theories to understand women-headed households’ vulnerabilities and whether micro-credit initiatives can reduce women’s vulnerabilities. She has also studied the everyday health security practices and how health securities can be promoted at household levels in order to offset disaster risks. Her second research strand focuses on reducing organisational vulnerabilities in order to ‘avoid disaster deaths’ and also improving disaster management practices through critical and reflective systems thinking.

Dr Ahmad Sukkar,

AgA Khan Postdoctoral fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Ahmad Sukkar is a scholar, architect and urbanist currently conducting an Aga Khan fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former Orient-Institut Beirut fellow, a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut, a former visiting lecturer at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, and a former research fellow at the University of Oxford. He has worked at leading architectural offices in the UK and the Middle East, including Zaha Hadid Architects. His work examines the interaction between architecture and culture in connection with design, heritage and identity in the Middle East with a focus on conflict, reconstruction and reconciliation in Syria.

Dr Eleanore Hargreaves,

Reader in Learning and Pedagogy, Institute of Education, University College London

Dr Eleanor Hargreaves is Reader in Learning and Pedagogy (Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, IOE, UCL). Dr Hargreaves teaches postgraduate international students about effective learning and teaching. She conducts research in the Middle East with disadvantaged students with a focus on the pupil perspective.

Dr Ghada Khattab,

Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University

Dr Ghada Khattab is a UK-based Lebanese academic with a background in linguistics, English language teaching and education. I work with multilingual children, focussing on their phonological and sociolinguistic development. I also collaborate with clinical colleagues on the assessment and diagnosis of bilingual children with speech and/or language impairment. In my work with adults I advance knowledge of the phonetic and phonological properties of various Arabic dialects, with a focus on Lebanese Arabic