With more than a million Syrians arriving to Lebanon since 2011, most studies have been focusing on refugees in encampment or on the precarious lives working-class Syrians lead. This thesis aims to fill a gap in the literature which overlooks a group of Syrians who now are part and parcel of the social and cultural life in Beirut; the middle and upper-class. Drawing primarily on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and data collected from semi-structured, in-depth interviews, the thesis explores these non-refugees’ economic, social, and cultural capitals and how they were utilized to settle and informally integrate in the city. It illustrates how the working-class Syrians are at the receiving end of discrimination by the Lebanese state and people, while the rich enjoy various privileges like access to citizenship, higher education, well-paying jobs, more respect, and an overall better experience of settlement in a new setting.
In this chapter we reflect on street art in Beirut during the October 17 revolutionary moment, when a decades-long accumulation of social, political and economic ills culminated in unprecedented and sustained protest across Lebanon. Through our engagement with a series of murals, stencils and graffiti that emerged on Beirut’s walls around October 17, as well as numerous scribbles by anonymous citizens around these more formal works of art and on random public surfaces, we argue that street art might have mediated the formation of citizen subjectivities by ‘making public’ conversations, contestations and reflections previously restricted to the private and intimate spaces of home and family.
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