Hope & Home: Voices from the Syrian Diaspora with Concert by Jaffa Trio

Date: July 18, 2025
Location: INTERACT, Altensteinstrasse 48, 14195 Berlin

Home is not a place so much as a project: an ongoing effort to stitch together memory, belonging, and the promise of a future. This panel traces that project across a decade of Syrian exile and the fresh uncertainties opened by the fall of the Assad regime in spring 2025. Drawing on hundreds of life-history interviews and new research on diaspora political engagement, our conversation follows Syrians as they cross borders, recreate kinship and community, and navigate host societies that alternately welcome, tolerate, or push them to the margins. Together with Sarah Bassisseh and Wendy Pearlman, we discuss how legacies of repression travel with refugees, how they shape the possibilities of activism abroad, and how the prospect of return—long deferred, suddenly thinkable—reorients the very idea of home.

The discussion converges on the emotional and practical dilemmas that arise when one finds oneself between homes, compelled to rebuild while haunted by what was lost. Alhakam Shaar, an urban sociologist leading The Aleppo Project and a protagonist in the testimonies under review, joins the two scholars on stage to ground the conversation in lived experience and to reflect on the solidarities that have emerged between research and activism.

The evening closes with a performance by Jaffa Trio in the garden of the INTERACT Centre, whose Levant-centered folk repertoire carries listeners across the soundscape of displacement and return, reminding us that music can sustain a sense of place even when geography cannot.

More info at: https://www.interact.fu-berlin.de/News/INTERACT_conversations_9_Syria.html