Lindsay Gifford is an anthropologist and refugee studies scholar whose research follows refugee trajectories from home country persecution through first countries of flight and resettlement into diaspora. Her research is primarily focused among Middle Eastern and Latin American communities on experiences of refugeehood, from root causes of forced migration, experiences of legal and social liminality, and establishing life and community in exile while seeking safety. She has field research experience in Syria, Jordan, Finland and the US and has traveled extensively in the Mediterranean, Mexico and Central America.
She is the author of “Homeland (Dis-)Engagement Processes among the New Syrian Diaspora” in The Contemporary Middle East in an Age of Upheaval (James L. Gelvin, ed., Stanford 2021) and “Middle Eastern Refugeehood in the Happiest Place on Earth: Syrians and Iraqis Entering Finland’s Welfare State Bureaucracy” in Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees (Marcia Inhorn and Lucia Volk, eds., Berghahn 2021), among others. Her dissertation research focused on informal gendered civil society networks under the authoritarian Syrian state, particularly working-class women’s rotating credit associations. Her current research follows South American asylum-seekers in Chicago's Welcoming City.
Professor Gifford holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University and is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Anthropology at UCLA.