Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Child Labor : An Adaptive Strategy Among Syrian Refugees., Tasneem Karim

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis investigates child labor as an adaptive strategy among Syrian refugees living in urban host communities in the Middle East. While research has shown an increasing prevalence of child labor in these communities, an anthropological investigation into how it manifests and why it persists is valuable in elucidating the implications of systemic barriers to socioeconomic success and the dissonances in discourse regarding child labor between families and aid workers. Accordingly, this research is based on transnational, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an urban host community in Irbid, Jordan, humanitarian/government offices in Irbid and Amman, Jordan, and the resettled Syrian …