Sydney Rey Hallisey

My name is Damion Blake, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies. I currently serve as Elon’s Faculty Fellow for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Education. Today, I am here to present the PERCS Outstanding Ethnography Award. This award recognizes a student who has conducted the most outstanding ethnographic research project at Elon University, judged according to the quality of the research design, and the weight of its contribution to existing scholarship. The award is given by PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies.

This year our recipient is Sydney Hallisey, her majors are International & Global Studies (with a Middle East concentration) and Political Science. And she has minors in Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.

Sydney is a Lumen Scholar and was awarded the Lumen Prize in 2019 to pursue her fieldwork research on Syrian refugees who have been displaced. In the winter term of 2020, she spent four weeks doing intensive fieldwork research in Istanbul, Turkey. Sydney interviewed 25 displaced Syrians (22 women and 3 men) in her study. The findings of her work describes the narratives of female refugees; how their roles and identities have changed because of forced migration, and how these identity changes, particularly as they relate to womanhood and motherhood are impacting their families.

Sydney plans to pursue a career in International Law with a focus on Human Rights after Elon. She has already been accepted into the University of Virginia’s law school to pursue International Law.

Congratulations Sydney!