About the speaker:
Emilie Lund Mortensen is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology in Aarhus, Denmark. Emilie was granted a 4-year scholarship from the Graduate School of Arts and begun her studies in September 2016. However, Emilie has been working on her current research project during the course of her MA studies. In the spring of 2016 Emilie undertook 4 month of fieldwork among Syrian refugee youth in Amman. Emilie’s PhD project Building Better Futures focuses on the centrality of ethics in human life through ethnographic exploration of struggles among Syrian refugee youth to reconstitute themselves and their lives as good in the face of war and displacement. It aims at understanding, how the experience of war affects the ethical striving of the youth and further, how they figure the future, transform themselves, and respond to a new situation with different potentialities in Amman. The project critically engages in anthropological theory on refugee youth, ethics and moral becoming, which together brings a new perspective on the becoming of male youth in warscapes and the orientational effects generated by long-term conflict.