One of the first posts that Suad Aldarra ever made on X (formerly Twitter) features an infographic she found online about the Syrian refugee crisis. It includes a supposedly generic Syrian family – the mother with her hair covered, her bearded husband and their two children, all crying amid illustrations of guns, barbed wire, bombs and a skull-and-crossbones. “This is how media shows us. This sucks. #NegativeNarrativeMatters,” she wrote on in October 2019.
That narrative mattered to Aldarra, because she herself had fled Syria in 2012 with her husband, leaving behind family, friends, pets and precious possessions in search of safety. Both she and her husband were qualified software engineers, with highly sought-after skills and experience, yet at every turn they found themselves being reduced to just two things: Syrian and refugee.
Job offers that might have got them out of Egypt, where they had temporarily settled, were withdrawn as soon as the Syrian passport appeared. “We were very frustrated,” she says. “We were stuck in Egypt; we weren’t allowed to stay and we weren’t allowed entry anywhere else.” In desperation, they considered whether to attempt the incredibly dangerous boat crossing to Europe. “I never thought that we’d need that thing – we were financially stable, we had degrees – but there were no options,” she says.
Finally, a job offer came and stayed: a position as a software engineer with a company in Ireland. “I always say that that job offer was my boat to safety,” Aldarra says.
Aldarra didn’t come from a family of engineers. In fact, her mother was an English literature graduate, and it was assumed that Aldarra – despite her childhood fondness for taking things apart to see how they were made – would follow in her footsteps. She loved books and writing, but the arrival of the first computer into her family home in Syria, shortly followed by the internet, catapulted her into an exciting new world. “I just couldn’t get enough of that world of computers,” Aldarra recalls. She taught herself to build websites using a program that enabled her to study the underlying code.
I just couldn’t get enough of that world of computers.
When the time came to decide what to study at university, Aldarra stood at a crossroads between literature and engineering. Then, someone said to her that engineering was for boys. “So, I went after engineering, just to prove that women are engineers as well,” she says.
Aldarra majored in software engineering at Damascus University, and worked for four years before the Syrian civil war, which started in 2011, made it too unsafe for her and her husband to remain in the country. They eventually found their way to Ireland. “The time when I chose to study engineering, I think it had this butterfly effect all over my life, until that moment when I managed to get a job offer, get a visa, go on a plane and go to Ireland and start this new life.”
Technology for good
Aldarra’s life-saving job at Fujitsu involved building software prototypes for data scientists who were working with technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Their research interested her so much that she started teaching herself about machine learning and data mining, and started a part-time master’s degree in data science.
A chance encounter with someone from UNICEF led to a job opportunity that combined Aldarra’s software and data skills with her Arabic language skills. The United Nations body, which is responsible for humanitarian and developmental aid for children, was looking at how to analyse data from social media to determine the number of refugees on the move at any one time, so they could better target their resources and support.
This sparked Aldarra’s interest in the use of technology and data for good. It also tied in with the project she was working on for her master’s thesis, which used data to explore xenophobia in the media. “I was reading those headlines, and I was dealing with all those questions on a daily basis,” Aldarra says. “Every time I meet someone and the word ‘Syria’ comes up, I see all the kind of reactions whenever I mention my home country.” She would find herself saying, “I’m Syrian, but I’m not a refugee; I’m here on a work permit,” as if ‘refugee’ was a bad, negative word.
It got her wondering how and when ‘refugee’ became so loaded with negative connotations. For a year, Aldarra studied newspaper stories and headlines, looking at which words ‘refugee’ was associated with in media reports. She then used machine learning to characterise those associations according to how xenophobic they were.
The project became RefugeesAre, a news-analysis platform that uses machine learning to map media reporting on refugees and identify hot spots of negative reporting and associations. The platform also provides data visualisation tools to highlight these trends.
“I didn’t want it to end up as just a thesis in a drawer or a PDF file,” Aldarra explains. “I wanted the output to be something that people can understand – everyday people, not necessarily experts in AI or machine learning.”
In 2018, the project won a slew of awards, including in the Techfugees Global Challenge Competition – run by Techfugees, a global tech organisation that works with and supports displaced persons – and the European DataSci & AI – an organisation for AI and data science professionals in Europe – awards. But four years later, Aldarra found that little had changed; if anything, the xenophobic attitudes to refugees had worsened. So, she went back to her other passion: writing.
The power of the pen
“I realised that I wanted to own the narrative about the Syrian crisis,” she says. “The books that I was reading, or the articles were all by Western journalists, and it didn’t necessarily reflect the real story.”
When her debut memoir, I Don’t Want To Talk About Home, came out in July 2022, it had an impact far greater than she could have imagined, including winning the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. “The messages that I get about how much I brought Syria to life, how much I showed the Syria before war that I wanted to bring back to life, the Syria that I fell in love with,” she says; those messages have driven home to her how much of an effect her writing has had.
I realised that I wanted to own the narrative about the Syrian crisis.
“I love science, but art has a superpower much faster than science, to spread messages and to reach people’s hearts.”
Story by Bianca Nogrady