Hadil Louz is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews on a fully funded scholarship. Her research examines relationships between memory, trauma, and solidarity amongst Palestinian refugees in Berlin. She does so by examining how memories of political violence and exile are subtly shaped by present-day circumstances, and vice versa (i.e. how current life possibilities and pressures reconfigure memories of the past) in a diasporic community. This research promises to shed light on the political and social pressures facing Palestinian refugees in Germany, how they respond to them, and otherwise build new lives in exile.
Hadil is a Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, Gaza, and now based in the UK as a political refugee. Before coming to the UK to pursue her higher studies, she worked as a visibility officer assistant in the main headquarter at the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Hadil was awarded a fully funded Gaza scholarship from Oxford Brookes University for her master’s degree in International Human Rights Law and was chosen as a Success Story in the university’s publications and a cover story for the university’s annual journal. Recently Hadil earned a second master’s (MSc) in Social Anthropology at the London school of Economics (LSE) with Distinction.