INTERNATIONALLY • Quantedge - Cambridge Masters Scholarships • Voices
Joelle Deeb
What the Waters Hold
Joelle is a recipient of the Quantedge – Cambridge Masters Scholarship (International), pursuing her MPhil in Architecture at the University of Cambridge.
Originally from Syria, Joelle is an architect and researcher whose work centres on water—how it shapes borders, ecologies, and the lives of communities living within them. For the past five years, she has led the Water Commons Archive, conducting fieldwork across the Eastern Mediterranean and surrounding region to investigate the ways water can both create and dissolve borders, and her MPhil extends this inquiry.
Water is never just water — it is…
the medium through which different epistemologies are negotiated and contested –quietly, through sanitation networks, urban plans, architecture, and the sedimented histories of populations on the move. At the Water Commons Archives, this conviction grounds everything: to study water is to study power in the everyday.
This scholarship...
enables research that is historically urgent and personally necessary. Beyond material support, it is a form of recognition: that histories of places long held at the periphery of dominant academic narratives carry legitimate scholarly weight. It allows me to sustain work that refuses the disciplinary separations between architecture, political history, and the spatial experience of displacement.
Without this scholarship, I would have had to…
narrow the scope and ambition of this work. The research depends on archival access across multiple countries, sustained fieldwork in fragile and post-disaster contexts, and uninterrupted time required for rigorous historical analysis.
The story I most want the world to hear about Syria is…
its complex and layered intellectual, architectural, and cultural history that long predates the catastrophes of recent decades: histories of cities and rivers, of scholarly traditions, of built environments that encoded collective meaning across generations, of waters that defy borders, but also of conflicts that made borders possible. Much of this endures through the practices of those who refuse erasure.
My perfect day at Cambridge…
begins in the archives, with the alertness that comes from not knowing what you are about to find. It continues in conversation with historians, geographers, and architects, where ideas move fluidly across disciplinary boundaries. It ends beside the River Cam, writing. What sustains me is the proximity of people who recognise that knowledge is always situated, always political, and always in the making.
In ten years, I hope to...
have contributed scholarship on architecture, territorial history, and the colonial and postcolonial formation of the modern Eastern Mediterranean, work that challenges how borders and modernity are conceptualised in the region and expands the archive on which that understanding rests. I also hope to build the Water Commons Archives into a sustained research institution — documenting water’s political and spatial histories across the region, and mentoring younger researchers, contributing to the intellectual infrastructure I once needed and did not always find.
One piece of advice I'd give to a student from a similar background is...
Your perspective carries knowledge that others cannot access from the outside. The proximity you have to certain histories, languages, and places is not incidental to your scholarship; it is its epistemological foundation. Do not mistake specificity for marginality, or situatedness for limitation. The questions that feel most urgent and most yours are the questions the field has not yet known how to ask.