Three QuesTions wiTh SARAH E. PARKINSON author of Beyond the Lines

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The research that I did for this book involved conversations with some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. People often shared stories that involved the most absurd, romantic, terrifying, joyous, and devastating moments in their lives. I value those moments of confidence and reflection for what they allowed me to share with and learn from people. The interlude that opens the book, with Munadileh the battlefield nurse, is a good example; the vignette in Chapter 3 where Abu Wissam and his family fled the 1982 invasion in his the course of time. There are memoirs by some of the foreign providers who worked in the camps, and I’d love to see a more complete representation of local providers’ experiences as well. cousin’s wedding car and wound up facing an Israeli tank in an orchard is another. It’s hard to say that there are “favorites” among them.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

Since I’ve written the book, I’ve completed the training to be an emergency medical technician. People I interviewed for this project were part of the inspiration for this decision, as were experiences connected to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. I would love to go back and speak more deliberately to the care providers who worked in the various medical establishments to ask more about how they changed their practices and techniques over

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

People are complicated. They act against their interests. They believe seemingly ridiculous things. They take incomprehensible risks. Political science has frankly struggled as a field to capture that complexity while articulating clear, comprehensible, persuasive arguments.