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Paper short abstract

I examine enabling education as a form of care among displaced Syrian families in Beirut amid financial crisis and marginalisation. I ask how socio-material conditions and infrastructural breakdown shape the everyday practices through which families strive to enable their children’s education.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines enabling education as a form of care within the dynamics of family life among displaced Syrian families living in Beirut under conditions of severe financial crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and early 2023, it explores how families sought to sustain their children’s education in a context where access was deeply precarious: public schooling was constrained by discrimination and a prolonged teacher strike, while meeting the costs of private schooling was highly challenging and often impossible.

I analyse how socio-material conditions and infrastructural breakdown shaped the everyday practices through which education was made possible, framing enabling education as a mode of affective future-making. Since the onset of Lebanon’s economic crisis in 2019, basic infrastructures have deteriorated, rendering access to electricity, water, and fuel unreliable, while hyperinflation has eroded purchasing power, turning everyday survival into an ongoing struggle and intensifying the precarity of already marginalised communities.

Yet even under these conditions, Syrian families—especially mothers—continued to strive and sacrifice to secure their children’s education. The paper traces how enabling education became entangled with multiple domains of everyday life, including precarious labour conditions, refugee policies, experiences of discrimination, cutting back on food and other essentials, housing arrangements, and mothers’ own educational trajectories. I argue that Syrian mothers framed enabling education as a crucial way of enhancing their children’s future prospects, even in social and economic conditions where the benefits of education remained profoundly uncertain.