Lotte Buch Segal is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. For the last ten years she has worked on issues of endurance, violence and subjectivity in Arab families affected by conflict, both those who reside in the Arab world and those who are now refugees in Europe. The bulk of her research however concerns Palestine, more specifically families of Palestinian prisoners and so-called martyrs. Her book ‘No Place for Grief-Martyrs, Prisoners and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine’ (Penn Press) came out earlier this year.
Additionally, she has worked on the gendered aspects of the torture experience. Currently she is heading a collaborative project termed ‘Slippery Suffering: A comparative ethnographic study on the encounters between survivors of violence from the MENA region and the Scandinavian welfare states’. This project is based on the idea that there is something unsettled about the experiences of war, violence and torture that refugees live through and they way in which these are acknowledged, or not, in different ways across Scandinavia.