PRFDHR Seminar: Syrian Refugees in Jordan: Parental burnout, father engagement, and family cohesion during COVID-19, Professor Catherine Panter-Brick

How do men engage with their families in contexts of forced displacement? Engaging with men as fathers is important for sustaining initiatives that seek to build cultures of peace, equity, and social inclusion. It is also important for designing interventions that enhance family cohesion, mental health, and child development. Yet in research and policy, the “father factor” has been all too often ignored. Professor Catherine Panter-Brick begins this talk with a policy brief that gives concrete examples of community-level interventions engaging with fathers to build social change. She then outlines current research with Syrian refugee families, undertaken in Jordan at the invitation of Taghyeer, a non-profit foundation focused on social entrepreneurship and education. Together with colleagues, they assessed the extent to which fathers engaged with their family and community, linked discrepancies in spousal reports to family dynamics, and evaluated family-level impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their work contributes to a small number of studies that have focused on men as fathers, their family-directed behaviors, and family-level pandemic impacts in refugee communities.
Catherine Panter-Brick is the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University. She is an expert on risk and resilience, having spent three decades working with people affected by war, poverty, and marginalization. A medical anthropologist, Panter-Brick was trained in both human biology and the social sciences. She has extensive experience leading mixed-methods research, having directed over forty interdisciplinary projects in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, the UK and the USA. For her work in humanitarian areas, she received the Lucy Mair Medal, awarded by the Royal Anthropology Institute to honor excellence in the application of anthropology to the active recognition of human dignity.
On the issue of resilience and mental health, Panter-Brick has been a keynote speaker at the United Nations, contributed to international media broadcasts, and presented at international iNGO dissemination events, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the United States Institute of Peace. She leads research initiatives to develop effective partnerships between scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Her work with Syrian refugee youth in Jordan is an example of scientific research evaluating the extent to which interventions can alleviate stress, boost resilience, and improve lives in war-affected communities. She publishes extensively in biomedical and social sciences journals, and has coedited seven books, most recently Medical Humanitarianism (Penn Press 2015) and Pathways to Peace (MIT Press, 2014).