Haneen is Researcher with the Middle East Centre and co-leads the 'Urbanity in the Time of Pandemic: a Study of Infrastructures of Care in Palestine during the C-19 Crisis' project, funded by the Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme and in collaboration with Birzeit University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from LSE, an LLM from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an LLB from Haifa University.
Her research is concerned with the social and legal history of Arab Jerusalem between 1948–1967. Through a study of the Jerusalem municipality archival records, she traces the political, social, legal and economic transformation in Arab Jerusalem after 1948. Specifically, she studies the city’s urban loss and revival, including in the areas of municipal law and labour rights, local economy, tourism and infrastructure. Haneen’s essay ‘A Municipality Seeking Refuge – Jerusalem Municipality in 1948’, published in the Jerusalem Quarterly journal, won the 2019 Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem.
In the past, Haneen worked as a lawyer, and later as a research assistant with the LSE Middle East Centre. She was a researcher with the project Archival City – Bridging Urban Past and Future, and a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. She is also a translator with several research centres, and has contributed to a number of Arab newspapers and cultural media platforms, including Assafir al-Arabi and Jadaliyya.