ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Arek Dakessian is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Global Health and Development (IGHD), Queen Margaret University of Edinburgh. He is a sociologist interested in cultural production, material culture, racialisations and refugeedom. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Casting Nets and Framing Films: An Ethnography of Networks of Cultural Production in Beirut” was a mixed-methods ethnographic exploration of filmmaking networks in his hometown drawing upon social network analysis (SNA). It engaged with how freelance filmmakers navigate the social network markets in which they operate, how they are co-produced by the films that they produce and, finally, the emergence of social worlds out of sustained on-set relationships and their spillover into life off-set. Arek is also a founding member of LIVED, an Edinburgh-based charity dedicated to researching refugeedom (www.livedprojects.org), as well as a member of the Social Network Analysis group of Scotland.