Agenda

Overlapping refugees inside Lebanon’s Palestinian camps: Reshaping socio-spatial interactions through urban margins

Lecture by Stefano Fogliata, Ph.D student (Università di Bergamo)

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union

Abstract

Despite being historically spatially contracted and socially constrained, Palestinian camps in Lebanon have turned once more into  “transitional zones of emplacement” (Janmyr and Knudsen, 2016) for thousands of people recently fleeing the Syrian conflict. The research investigates how refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility and develop a wide range of daily practices that extends beyond the camp's boundaries, exploring how imperceptible and hyper-mobile tactics of existence re-elaborate Palestinian refugee camps into meaningful places of elusive contestation. Moving from newcomers’ strategies for protection mainly performed during nighttime, my work expounds on how refugees reinterpret boundaries between camps and “forms of camp spaces” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh, 2013) through a wide spectrum of practices grounded on translocal informal networks.

Mainly hinged on an on-going fieldwork started in 2014, the research hinges on the interconnectivities evolving around the Palestinian Bourj el Barajneh camp and Hezbollah-controlled Beirut southern suburbs. Therefore, by extensively investigating practices of mutual recognition and invisibility emerging between the “habitual” residents and Syria’s refugees, my work focuses on how transnational discourses and outdoor practices in locality effectively contest international gaps in protection, national securitization policies and arbitrary measures by local non-state actors. I argue that translocal informal networks transgressing urban boundaries effectively contribute to rethink the ambivalence of reified border spaces of exclusion (Agier, 2015) and consequently introduce new possibilities of reshaping the cultural map of the city.