Migrant worker solidarities and the creation of community in Lebanon

Project Lead:  Fuad Musallam

One of Fuad’s current projects investigates how migrant workers create political community in Lebanon in the face of gendered and racialised labour inequality. In 2018-19 he gained funding from the Max Weber Foundation for new ethnographic research with the Beirut-based Migrant Community Centre. In Lebanon, migrant workers only recently began campaigning collectively for their rights, having become precariously permanent residents in the face of social exclusion and a sponsorship system that delegates care and surveillance from the state onto individual employers.

The MCCs are vital spaces that promote recognition and mutual aid: language classes, computer courses, health checks, childcare, cultural nights. There, he facilitated the creation of a participatory archive of antiracist organising. As a collectively-curated mixture of protest paraphernalia, image library, and community history, the archive aims to foster members’ creative reflection on the histories of their own engagements. It also allows for a number of impact activities: with members he produced a visual history of MCC, and he curated an ongoing exhibition of protest banners from International Women’s Day and May Day marches. Continuing his partnership with the MCC, in April 2023 he ran archival collection and curation workshops with members towards a public exhibition, which took place in December 2024.