“May God Bless the Hand that Works”: Stories from Displaced Syrian Farmworkers during the COVID-19 Pandemic tells the stories of displaced Syrian agricultural workers in the Middle East during the COVID-19 pandemic. The graphic novel is an output of the Refugee Labour under Lockdown Project, a UK AHRC and Modern Slavery PEC-funded research project led by Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz at the University of Edinburgh.
This graphic novel is based on remote, semi-structured interviews and visual ethnographic “work diaries” with 80 Syrian agricultural workers in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and northwestern Syria between November 2020 and January 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel tells the stories of Syrian men, women, and children working in agriculture in the Middle East, as well as those of Syrian agricultural intermediaries and employers. In telling their stories, we hope to bring attention to the struggles and resilience of displaced Syrian farmworkers, whose labour is highly precarious and largely invisible.
The graphic novel was designed and illustrated by Sophia Neilson, a Scottish artist with a study background in Social Anthropology. You can learn more about Sophia’s work at @soofillustrates on Instagram and Twitter.
The novel was written by Mackenzie Klema and Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz, based on interviews conducted by Dr Shaher Abdullateef, Dr Salim Faisal Alnabolsi, and Dr Esraa Almashhour.
To read the novel on a computer, please use the e-reader below (scroll down for Turkish version).
To read the novel on a mobile phone, please click here.
To download your own copy of the novel, please click here (English), here (türkçe) and here (عربي).