Meriam Salem is an incoming PhD Sociology student at the University of California, Berkeley. Before attending Berkeley, she obtained her Master's in Human Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics. Her research interests builds upon the interdisciplinary works of scholars and writers who have moved away from traditions that locate refugees, immigrants, and the forcibly displaced as a legal classification requiring intervention.
In the nature of contributing to this expanding field, she envisions her work examining how surveillance and information-based societies continue to make and remake refugee and immigrant populations through webs of power relations that sees their migration as a problem that needs to be managed whether through urban policy, citizenship, housing, health, policing, and social welfare.