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Leila Hudson, "Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home: Syrian Women Displaced" (Syracuse UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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- [00:51]
Layla Hudson
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- [01:44]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:49]
Roberto Mazza
Hi, I'm Roberto Mazza and welcome to the New Books Network. Today my guest is Layla Hudson. Layla is the author of Lines of Assemblages of Syrian Women Displaced. The book was published by Syracuse University Press in 2025. While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life through the interwoven narratives of five middle aged sisters from Damascus. The book by Layla reveals about how Syria women navigate war, exile and the profound transformation of their families and identities. So drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, this book follows an extended Sunni Muslim family of as they flee their homes in Damascus, eastern Ghouta suburbs and scatter across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and eventually Europe. As these women move through an increasingly hostile landscape of border controls, refugee camps, and human trafficking networks, they must reinvent themselves from stable middle class mothers to resourceful survivors, from guardians of tradition to architects of change. And their journeys challenge conventional assumptions about refugee experiences, revealing how displacement reconfigures family networks, religious practices, and gender roles. Before we delve into all of this, first things first. Leila, welcome.
- [03:31]
Layla Hudson
Thank you.
- [03:33]
Roberto Mazza
I want to start with an easy question, I'd say. So can we start talking about you? Can you tell us something about yourself and more importantly, perhaps about the origins of the book?
- [03:45]
Layla Hudson
Well, the origins of the book date back decades, actually. I first went to Syria in the late 1980s, and I spent much of the 1990s in Syria doing dissertation research on 19th century, early 20th century Syria and transitions into the culture of nationalism. But over the course of the 90s, I spent so much time in Syria making wonderful connections and friends, including the women whose stories are told in the book. And in the 1990s, I secretly harbored a project of writing an ethnography about life in Assad's Ba' athist, authoritarian Syria. But of course, there were so many disincentives to do that that that project never materialized. And when the horrific circumstances of what would become the Syrian conflict that started in 2011 started pushing so many Syrians out of their homes and into forced migration and diaspora and internal displacement, that was the first time that I could envisage writing about the lives, the structures, the culture of ordinary women of Damascus. And I could only do it because of the horrible fact that they were no longer in Assad's Syria. And that's kind of the origin story of the project that their forced displacement allowed me to envisage, a project that I had wanted to write in one way or another for years, decades.
- [06:06]
Roberto Mazza
Even when you add something about yourself, I mean, you obviously talked about you've been to Syria in the 1980s and so forth, but, you know, maybe something about your own work and your backgrounds.
- [06:16]
Layla Hudson
Well, my own work and my own background. I'm both an anthropologist and a historian. And my work has always tried to, in the ways that all of us interdisciplinary historians and anthropologists aspire to do, to sort of bring the multiple dimensions featured in those disciplines together in new and creative ways. So I've always been interested in looking at how structures change over time in ways that are not purely theoretical but are also narratable and interface with people's ordinary lives. So that's always been my theoretical inclination and the aspiration of my work. I too, had aspired to work in Palestine, and some of my earliest work, dating back to my undergraduate days, even, was on Palestine. But being Palestinian myself, being Palestinian American, I found it for a variety of reasons, not not least of which was the family pressure to not work on Palestine, but to try and find analogs elsewhere in the Middle East. So I ended up falling in love with Damascus, if you will, as a vibrant, thriving, urban incubator of all of the issues that an anthropologist would be interested in, as well as having a historical researchable trail into the past. Yes, my career has involved work in Palestine, work in Syria, theoretical work on many other parts of the Middle east as well, and it encompasses everything from conflict and security studies to the kind of ethnography that I'm trying to do in the work in front of us.
- [08:40]
Roberto Mazza
Let's move to the book. So, Leila, your book tells the displacement story of five Syrian sisters from Damascus through oral history and ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017. Can you walk us through how you came to know the Araj sisters and how you approach documenting their experiences and what were the particular challenges and ethical considerations also conducting this kind of, I would say, very intimate research with displaced women across multiple countries?
- [09:13]
Layla Hudson
Yeah, well, as I mentioned, my history in Syria goes back to the late 1980s. And so I met many people whose lives I had hoped to document as part of an ethnography, and this family was among them. So when it became clear in 2012 and 2013 that they were subject to these horrible dynamics and these forces that pushed them out from their homes and we were in dialogue throughout this period, I asked them whether I could document their trajectories in a way that would obviously protect their identities, preserve their anonymity, and I hope, live up to the ethical standards and predicaments that we have as historians and anthropologists, and I've tried to do that, they were eager to tell their stories because, again, as part of this unprecedented violent disruption, I think in many cases, narrating their stories to.
- [10:50]
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- [10:52]
Layla Hudson
In interviews over WhatsApp, occasionally from time to time in person, was a useful exercise for them to remember to document, to share with one another, to compare their experiences, to tell them to their children, etc. Etc. That often we don't have when we are in the throes of some of the worst stuff that life puts us through. So in many ways, these sessions that we had were interviews in which other family members would interject in which people were working through in ways that I hope were helpful and processing some of the violent disruption that they had just been through. And so, yeah, it was, I think, without putting it too strongly, there was a therapeutic aspect to this as well.
- [12:01]
Roberto Mazza
Now, you talk about children. You mentioned children, and really the book opens with Salma's. That is one of the five sisters, teenage sons setting fire to plastic bags in the streets early in 2011, at the very beginning of a protest. And you follow each sister's different experience of when and why they decided to leave Damascus. What strikes me is how varied their breaking points were. So Salma worried about her son's activism. Maryam was trapped by urban warfare. For instance, in Hanan, she looked at the Guta region as some sort of, you use the expression river of hope. So can you talk us through how these five sisters experience the unraveling of Damascus so differently?
- [12:52]
Layla Hudson
Yeah, well, one of the beautiful kind of circumstances of having a long term relationship with multiple members of the same family allowed me very early on to notice and to try and find a way of expressing to readers the fact that everyone's story unfolds uniquely, including for sisters who we might assume, you know, are having much more similar experiences than the kind of strangers or randomly interviewed individuals that we see in much of the other literature. So what we, you know, what started as a sort of simple narration began to reveal the fact that depending on your class position, depending on your age, depending on your family circumstances, and depending of course, on your personality, there's more difference than there is similarity. So for the mother of adolescent boys, you have a certain set of concerns. For someone whose children are getting married and having their own children who have put down roots and are part of support structures, usually kinship based support structures, it's a whole different set of considerations. And that only intensified as we move through the different phases of displacement. And the other thing, of course, and this comes from being a slow writer, writing a process, or trying to narrate a process, is that from when this project began, around 2014, to when it comes to fruition, at least in the form of publication in 2024, 2025, that's 10 years of a child's life. So we see the children growing up, maturing, facing issues in their education, their entry into the workforce, and major life decisions about marriage and having their own children and things like this. So, so some of the things that we would normally, as analysts, sort of isolate, we're watching them happen in this dynamic situation of displacement. And so one of the hidden Themes of the overall book, I would say, is that where one is in the family cycle, if we could imagine a standard, and even that is a problem family cycle. If you're single, that's one thing. If your children are small, that's another thing. If you're managing multiple generations of a family, that's another. There are clear differences there. And this was all highlighted by focusing on the women who are very traditionally conservative women of a variety of different class positions. And so by looking at them, we also get to see their sons, we also get to see their daughters, we also get to see their grandchildren. And their personal aspirations are individual, but they're also for their families. So we get to tell the stories of the sons who normally would be featured. I would say in the kind of journalistic work that gets done about refugees, there is a proclivity to focus on men who are displaced, young single men who are displaced. And again, so much of this civilian displacement involves the complexities of family life. And even those young single men are part of families with mothers, sisters, potential partners, et cetera.
- [17:07]
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- [17:37]
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- [17:40]
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- [17:50]
Roberto Mazza
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- [17:51]
Layla Hudson
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- [17:52]
Roberto Mazza
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- [17:53]
Layla Hudson
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- [17:54]
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- [18:07]
Roberto Mazza
I want to ask a question about methodology. So you structure the book around the loos and guattaris concept of assemblages and lines of flight, which might sound abstract to some listeners, and it was very abstract to me too, when I started reading the book. But you're using these ideas very concretely to understand three phases. The rigid urban life of Damascus, the fragile household and making in exile, and the digital diasporic connection. And later on, I really want to ask about this digital world, which I think is very important. So how does thinking about displacement through these lenses help us understand what refugees actually experience as opposed to just seeing them? Statistics or victims? Exactly what you were just talking about, right?
- [18:59]
Layla Hudson
Well, you've noticed of course, something that was very important in the writing of this book, that it is a schizophrenic book, that I have theoretical aspirations, which I have tried to minimize because of their potential to interfere with the narratives that make a book worth reading and that are the primary medium for, you know, for getting a readership to engage. But I do have theoretical aspirations. And again, any scholars of theory out there are rolling their eyes in horror, I'm sure, because of the instrumentalized way that I turn to Deleuzian concepts. So I'm sure to those who focus on that realm of theory, this book's structure is frustratingly instrumentalized. Let me tell you, though, why I did it. Because the Deleuzian framework, in all its complexity, obscurity and difficulty, allows us to imagine structural analysis that is fluid and hydraulic rather than rigid and orthogonal, as the sort of the traditional theoretical default approaches are. So by looking at a more fluid structural approach, which I think the Deleuzian world can provide for us if we don't get overwhelmed, drowned, etc. In the complexity of that theoretical realm, it allows you to look at structures that are looser, that are more changeable. And very early on I picked up on the idea of chemical phase changes, from the rigid and the crystal crystalline to the more fluid to the more ethereal and vaporized and gaseous, if you will. And we start in the world of rigid crystal structures that are houses and streets and well worn ideologies and systems of power. And that's where these sisters start the narrative in the world of well known structures within which they live their lives. So fairly traditional, fairly congruent to our default structural notions of construction and building houses and then becoming imprisoned in them, right when they are displaced, they are trying to recover the muscle memory, if you will, of those places and cultures and ideologies and kinship structures that they grew up in. But they're in total flux. They're trying to recreate these traditional, secure, even brick and mortar or ideologically familiar terrains while they are being disoriented in nearby, slightly distorted environments that are similar but very, very different. And it's as simple as the difference between being identifiable as a Syrian in Lebanon because of your accent and stigmatized as part of this, you know, unwelcome, increasingly unwelcome new wave of refugees. So it's still familiar, but everything is in flux and everything slips through your fingers as you try to reassemble your households in a slippery and slightly different new terrain. And then by the time the younger Sisters make the decision to. To go for Europe. The proximity that they once shared in those houses, the aspirations that they had in the middle period, to recompose those houses as best they could. With everything slipping through their fingers, they suddenly cash in whatever they can and they go for broke. And the assemblages that hold them together as they make the painful decisions of how do you finance multiple expensive smuggling journeys and trips for different members of the family? The place where their family bonds now live is in the realm of electronic and digital media. It's their whatsapps, it's their Facebook pages, it's texts and mobile phones. And what I was trying to do was to find an overarching theoretical structure that would recognize both the continuity and the change that these people are going through as they are buffeted by forces much larger than they are, while not losing, of course, the. The localized, micro intimate details with which all this plays out. Everything is a decision. You have to cash something in or sell something to get the money for the trip. And those details, I think, are where the most poignant aspects of the story lie, rather than in the theory.
- [24:56]
Roberto Mazza
You just mentioned how these women were essentially managing household economies and kinship networks. And I want to focus briefly on a chapter that you've wrote, and it's called Managing Kin, essentially just talking about this point. So can I ask you, what did you learn about the gender dimension of refugee life? And again, you mentioned earlier how in general, media tend to focus on men. And we saw that even in the context of Gaza, often the images go to men, single men, young men. Of course, there are those covering women. But the reality is that the figure of the man, maybe with a child walking somehow in the media, captures more of the attention than the mother. So again, what did you learn about the gender dimension of refugee life that often get overlooked in policy discussions or media coverage? Let me use an example here. I was struck a few months ago when there was one of the first roundtable between Europeans and Americans about Ukraine, and a European leader asked about these children abducted by Russians. And essentially the Americans overlooked that. I found it striking how sometimes this dimension of women and children just gets pushed away.
- [26:15]
Layla Hudson
Well, because of the nature of this project, it was so clear that decision making, especially that initial, most wrenching decision to leave one's home, that these are not individual decisions, as we might. They're not only individual decisions, but they are family decisions. And it's very often wives and mothers concerned about their children who are the critical factor in making the decision to leave, including for Sons who leave on their own. So to underestimate that, that is where these decisions come from. And you can imagine it in your own context. Again, it's less of an individual decision, of a rational actor, and more of a family decision heavily, heavily, heavily determined by the women of the family. And in the case of this family in particular, and I speculate and imagine most families, it's so much about the future and the opportunities of the children and the men of the household. And that's the first aspect to manage. So that even, and especially in traditional families with traditional gender norms, it's the mothers and the grandmothers who are assessing and providing lots of feedback to the men and determining the sort of the best path for the children. So that became very clear. Another point that comes up is, again, where one is in what we might imagine as the life cycle of a traditional family is really important. I noticed immediately that the families, the mothers whose children were young and still needing education had certain challenges because as they move into displacement, there are at most two potential breadwinners for families with small children. And so Iba's family in particular wrestles with this. And of course, you have the young adolescents of Salma's family wanting to work and wanting to leave their education and start contributing to the family. So you've got the typical, typical, familiar to many dynamic of who's taking care of the children while we desperately try and make a living in an inhospitable new environment. When you contrast that with the older women, the older sisters, families, you have a new and interesting asset, and that is your in laws that when you have sons in law, daughters in law, and families that you have traditionally allied yourself with in the very serious commitment of, you know, joining your children together or in marriage as you go out into the world. A, you've got more potential breadwinners because there are more adults in the family. So you've got sons in law, daughters in law, and you've got the connections of those in law families who are also deeply invested in your family as well. So you have a broader social network, not just of acquaintances, but of people who are deeply invested in the success and future of your joint family. So the women who left as grandmothers and mothers in law had more resources, more people that would take them in, more people that would provide useful connections than the families with younger children. And that's what we mean by managing kin. So even in exile, the important work of matchmaking, the important work of finding partners for one's children, including in some pretty traditional Ways like traditional courtships and traditional vetting of potential grooms and things like that proceeds in the new, fluid households that are constantly being reassembled in exile. And the stakes are very high because now you have to worry about a future in which you're again, no longer in your crystalline, crystallized, rigid, familiar territory that you grew up in. But you might want to get married in Europe, you might want to get married in Germany, you might weigh in the balance staying in Turkey, going back, what have you. So those are some of the gendered and family aspects. And of course, the corollary of all this is to realize that the men, who very often are the scouts, very often are the pioneers of the family as it moves into diaspora, are rarely unconnected to a intelligent and critical family and women's perspective. And in the case, the tragic case that I document in the book, when a male son in law has had enough of exile and makes a decision to strike out simply because of the accumulated frustration and challenges of life in exile, I think you get a picture, I hope you get a picture of the ways in which the family tries to negotiate, restrain and process what ultimately transpires when a man makes an impulsive and risky decision.
- [32:37]
Roberto Mazza
I don't want to give too much away of the characters. I think readers should actually delve into the sisters and their stories. But in the final sections, you follow Salma and Iba as they make the dangerous crossing from Turkey to Greece, and you call one chapter the Aegean Odyssey and another one the Camp Didomeni. Meanwhile, another sister, Farida, is the one left behind. And I was wondering if you can take us through briefly what these journeys actually entailed and what it meant for the family that some sisters made it to Europe while others didn't.
- [33:15]
Layla Hudson
Yeah, well, when you read the accounts of the Aegean crossing, it was incredibly challenging in different ways for the different sisters going at different seasons, encountering, you know, running through a gauntlet of different challenges that is evolving month by month over the course of, you know, 2015, 2016, and even into 2017, as different European countries are putting in different measures as to discourage, respond to, leverage, the flow of migrants coming across. So it changes from the time that Salma first goes to the time that Iba goes. And it's interesting that Farida, the sister who ultimately does not go to Europe, was considering it, but as an older woman, the thought of taking a perilous winter journey was, you know, was not. Was not a risk that she was willing to take. So she, as I recall, was waiting for the springtime and the summertime, thinking that that journey would be less dangerous and less horrible when the Aegean calmed down in the spring. But of course, by that time, different factors, different political factors had begun to mobilize to prevent the flow of refugees into Europe by the familiar means. So she basically missed her window. And there are factors of a very, you know, a very personal and, you know, embodied nature. Do you think you can make that trip? Do you think your kids can make that trip? How cold is it going to be? How rough is the sea going to be? And those have, you know, the decisions that you make about timing, route, and the circumstances that you find yourself quite beyond your own decision making. You know, will you get picked up by the Coast Guard? Will your boat, as so many did, be sunk or be sabotaged? Will you give your money to the right trafficker or smuggler? Or will you, again, with your very limited information, choose the wrong one? There is so much that needs to be factored into your limited decision making, and then so much that is beyond your own decision making. So each journey ends up being very different. They're all traumatizing, they're all challenging. And to the extent that my friends were so lucky to make it through what so many did not make it through, they emerged on the other side to a whole new set of challenges, but validated by the kind of life test that, you know, that they could face anything that Europe presented them with after that.
- [37:00]
Roberto Mazza
Yeah, I guess I had the same impression. Once you read about their stories, when you really realize that once we made it across, they can literally face anything, because that was really something. We can't even begin to imagine what it means to leave a house and go across seas knowing that you don't know. You just don't know what's going to happen. I want to talk about this electronic media world that you talked about earlier. So you write about how WhatsApp, in particular Facebook and cell phones, really became crucial technologies for maintaining family bonds across vast distances. And they created what you call a diasporic assemblage of digital communication. How did technology reshape this women's relationship with each other and with the concept of home, which is central to your book, when they were scattered across Lebanon, Turkey, Germany.
- [37:57]
Layla Hudson
Well, this is one of the aspects of the book that I wish I had had the energy and the page length to go into in greater detail, because I really do think that the entire arc or trajectory of the book, which takes you from a very traditional, rigid, authoritarian, brick and mortar proximity where these Sisters were in their own homes, but visiting with each other on a regular basis, speaking face to face, engaging in what an anthropologist would be able to identify as traditional modes of female sociability. Getting together in the morning to drink coffee and then going to the other end of the arc where because of this violence and circumstances and their responses to it, they are spread across multiple continents, in multiple countries. And the telephone, the mobile cell phone becomes their main communicative link. Some of them had tried to transport laptops as well, computers as internally displaced people, but those were mostly. Those are mostly kind of repositories. And this is important too, repositories for your media, your videos, your pictures, your music collection, et cetera. And those were very unwieldy in the form of laptops and dangerous in one case, in the form of a desktop that they were trying to move across town. It does come down to the cell phone and all the apps that are on the cell phone. And there are two main modalities. It becomes increasingly clear. And remember, I am also interviewing and communicating with the protagonists, with my friends, by means of cell phones. And that's a methodological question for historians and anthropologists right now as well. But it was certainly a main modality for us, but for them, in maintaining their identity, in maintaining their families, they were completely dependent on cellular, telephony and all the apps and smartphone things that come with it for two things, one for the exchange of information and the other for the maintenance of affective ties. Right. So our picture in the book is rather circumscribed because I couldn't, in spite of my inclinations, go into everything, but they were in telephonic WhatsApp communication with their own cousins, with their own nephews, with their own in laws, with their own friends who had gone before them, who were sending back, you know, things like contacts to particular smugglers or brokers, the digital information about the escrow or insurance accounts where you would deposit the money to be released with to your smuggler or trafficker or broker upon safe release, and the exchange of voice messages or PIN numbers or what have you. At one point, you know, the overland route through Macedonia and into Serbia. People would be sending back and forth messages about, don't go to this town, avoid this highway, there's a patrol here, or there's a convenience store where you can charge your phone, or here's a map that you can use to guide yourself through. The people who went first would be sending back an active and dynamic stream of information to the people who were behind them. This has its own dynamics, which, of course, hopefully social scientists are out there studying as well. And the other thing, of course, in addition to the exchange of information, and the information that is exchanged in these networks is crucial, critical, eye level information. So not just about an individual transaction or contact, but about pathways, routes, obstacles, dangers on the boats. And this was a frequent feature. Your cell phone was your. Was your friend on the boat for a number of reasons. You could independently track. And many of the rafts and boats had multiple people independently tracking the trajectory through GPS and other navigational software so that each boat was able to do that. And then the boats became. Sorry, the phones on the boats in the most perilous moments became so important for summoning the Coast Guard or summoning activists in Europe or in Turkey who could summon the Coast Guard. And then you would send your location. Now, sometimes that would result in, you know, we have lots and lots of anecdotes about how this resulted in, you know, saving disabled craft. Others in which the people who were on the boat were really nervous about sending their information to the Coast Guard in case, as we have lots of anecdotal evidence as well, the Coast Guard would return them to the place where they had started back on the Aegean coast in Turkey. We also have anecdotal accounts, and perhaps more than that of sabotaging the boats and sinking the boats. So again, all of this based on your cell phones. In addition to that, you know, when your family is spread across all these distant locations, texts WhatsApp group chats is where the family dynamic that had once lived in your morning coffee chats, right? That's where all this plays out is on the group chat. And so by the end, the group chat of the family becomes the space for how affection, advice, rivalries, irritations play out. And you can always sort of drop off the group chat, as we all know from our own lives, right? And one of my goals was to portray that, you know, certainly in the case of the violence and compression of displacement, but also generally, everyone is living structures and moving through structures that sometimes exist in crystalline, rigid brick and mortar form, sometimes in fluid form, that you're working so hard to hold together in some way that seems familiar and functional and is always slipping away from you. And then sometimes, and this was actually, I would speculate here, it's actually, it can be helpful to relieving those pressures of displacement to be in your own place and to not be dealing with all your family members trying to live in the same house, but rather having A relationship that lives in the group chat, that lives in texts, that still resonates with love, with affection, with nostalgia, with memory, with affect of all kinds. And I think that's something that we can sympathize with, that all these things are happening simultaneously, but the process of displacement allows us to sort of artificially segregate them into different phases of displacement.
- [46:04]
Roberto Mazza
I have a couple more questions, and one that I'm trying to so to merge together. So when we look at chapter 20 of your book, you cover basically the contemporary between 2016 and 2024. And by this point, some sisters are in Germany with asylum, others are in Turkey or Lebanon. So I was wondering, what does what you call reterritorialization look like after years of displacement? And have any of the sisters been able to create something like a stable home? Or is displacement some sort of a permanent condition? And then you were actually able to publish the book right after the Assad regime fell in December 2024. So I was wondering, have you been in touch with the sisters? And what does Syria's liberation mean for women like them who have been displaced for over a decade?
- [47:01]
Marshall Poe
Well.
- [47:07]
Layla Hudson
Of the four surviving sisters, the two older sisters were among the first. And these were the two sisters who did not choose to go to Europe, but ended up, you know, making their peace with living as re territorialized refugees and an increasingly hostile environment in Turkey. These two older sisters, including Farida, she was the first one to move back to Syria, and they were able to go home. So the ones who never moved on further than Turkey moved back in the spring of 2025 with their families and are building new lives back in Syria. And it's not easy, but it's home. And I don't think they regret their decisions in any way. I think they are happy to be back, happy to be home, happy to be picking up after where they left off in 2012 or 2013. And that involves renting houses while they figure out what has happened to their destroyed houses and whether they're salvageable. So it's not easy by any means. The two sisters, the two younger sisters who made it very successfully to Germany and made lives for themselves and their children in Germany, have also both been back to Syria in the summer, I believe, of 2025. But they went back to visit, right? They went back for lengthy visits that involved looking for investment opportunities, looking for houses.
- [49:18]
Depop Advertiser
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- [49:21]
Layla Hudson
Still going back now as German citizens going back to Germany with powerful, strong ties with all kinds of new horizons and hopes for investing in Syria, but now living as very cosmopolitan citizens of the world. Right. So it breaks down quite, quite along the lines of how far you got, which is not unrelated to how old you were to how successful you were, re territorializing closer to home versus now. And of course, the generation of the youngest kids are more working, going to university and getting married within the Syrian community, mostly in Germany. And so they're another generation who I think would have a hard time envisioning, this is my opinion, of course, going back and living in Syria, but are absolutely connected to it, you know, as home, as another version of home.
- [50:38]
Roberto Mazza
Is there anything that I didn't ask about your work that you would like to discuss?
- [50:44]
Layla Hudson
Well, you know, the last moment before publication, of course, was the fall of the Assad regime. And that was part and parcel. And you can read about it in the sort of the hasty preface that I wrote, which I think describes, describes the, you know, the attitude. And the next story is, of course, what does Syria under Ahmad Al Shara, who is very popular with the demographic to which these sisters belong? You know, what is the reconstruction of Syria going to look like? And that's, you know, that's what does it mean when we bring all those digital assemblages and all the experiences and new assets of that diasporic decade back to Syria? That's going to be very interesting to watch.
- [51:39]
Roberto Mazza
This was Leila Hudson, author of Lines of Assemblages of All Syrian Women Displaced, published by Syracuse University Press in 2025. Layla, thank you so much.
- [51:53]
Layla Hudson
Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity.