Pomeps Conversations

We hear from Wendy Pearlman, an associate professor in the department of political science at Northwestern University. Pearlman has carried out open-ended interviews with displaced Syrians since 2012. "Like many people watching the Syrian uprising from afar, I was fascinated of the individual-level experience of what this must have been like for Syrians who went out into the streets, what drove them to do so, what drove them to stay. How people were experiencing protest, how people were experiencing violence. How people ultimately fled the country as refugees. I decided there was no better way to understand that lived experience— the personal experience of dramatic political phases— than to get to individuals themselves and ask them to tell me their stories." "For the most part, it's not that the people are telling the same anecdote. They're telling very different anecdotes of their own personal experiences. They'll tell personal stories of their childhood under Assad's Syria, and when they went to their f