Shanneik’s work examines the intersections of religion, female agency and mobility across Europe and the Middle East, with a particular focus on women’s creative and transnational forms of resistance. She has conducted extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women across the Levant, Arab Gulf countries, Iran and various European countries.

A distinctive feature of her work is the use of immersive and arts-based methodologies. She integrates body-mapping, augmented reality and virtual reality to co-produce knowledge with displaced communities and to foreground lived experiences of displacement, agency and resistance

Barhoum brings extensive expertise in Arabic language, refugee education and Syrian minority identities in Europe. Within the RELI-GENE project, her work examines the relationship between genetic knowledge, religious identity and ethnic belonging among Yazidi minorities in Sweden and Germany.

Her research explores how consanguineous and endogamous marriages shape family formation, communal continuity and belonging in the diaspora. Using ethnographic methods, she analyses how migration, community obligations, individualisation and health concerns are transforming marital norms within Yazidi communities in Europe.