Diala is Research Assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre project ‘Lebanon Unsettled’. She holds an MSc in Urban Planning and Policy from the American University of Beirut. Before joining the LSE Middle East Centre, she worked as a research assistant in Lebanon in the areas of urban and development studies, looking at prosperity indexes as well as alternative cultural and economic geographies of urban poverty, informal work and everyday coping strategies in contexts of precarious urban environments. 

Diala’s interests and research are primarily orientated around basic services and refugee studies; this includes power relations and their impact on decision making processes, knowledge production and self-help mechanisms in informal settlements in the global south, water, waste and sanitation economies in marginalised neighbourhoods, social and economic integration of refugees including informal adaptive mechanisms, planning theory and political ecology.