Book Talk | The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora

Join the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies for a book talk with Wendy Pearlman, author of The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora. This event will be in person with an option to attend virtually. 

War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting “refugee crises” as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she specializes in Middle East politics, social movements, and narrative approaches to understanding conflict and displacement. She is the author of six books: The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright Books, 2024); Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out (with Muzoon Almellehan, Knopf, 2023); Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018); We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003).