Spaces of Hospitality: Humanitarian Refugee Camps and Informal Practices of Integration

My research this summer primarily focused on different responses of hosting Syrian refugees in Jordan. To do this, I have conducted research with Syrians hosted among Palestinians living in an “informal” self-built camp in Amman, the capital city to Jordan.  Most of the refugee populations today are not in Europe; they are in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Syrian refugees crossing neighbouring borders find themselves in communities that are largely migrants themselves. These informal camps are not UN operated, in the humanitarian sense, as such they provide a way to understand responses and modalities of hosting refugee inside the histories of migration and movement in the Middle-East and outside of western humanitarian reason. I focused on the practices of three cohorts: refugees, host-communities and workers (non-profit, for-profit, non-governmental and governmental); specifically local entrepreneurial activities of livelihood extension for refugees and Syrian women’s piecework at home in the informal Palestinian camp.

2018 Summer Research funded by Global Metropolitan Studies