World Refugee Week provides an opportunity to reflect on and highlight the diverse challenges facing displaced peoples. In this piece, Tatiana Thieme (UCL-Geography) draws on her project's research with refugees and asylum seekers living in the city of Paris. The everyday (and every-night) challenges faced by marginalised refugees and asylum seekers - stemming from the…
Category: Blog
Why Host Refugees?
Displacement is mostly experienced in urban contexts, meaning that the vast majority of refugees live alongside, and often within the very houses of, their hosts, including established refugee communities, or 'refugee hosts'. In this piece, which is a re-posting from the Oxford Brookes Centre for Development and Emergency Practice blog, Zoe Jordan examines the dynamics…
Al-Mustaqbal in the Space of Refuge
Displacement forces refugees to confront restrictions to their mobility, whereby the policies of states and other actors tend to physically limit their access to space. However, as Jude Wafai argues in this piece, this immobility is often combined with challenges that restrict refugee futures too. By exploring how space interacts with temporality in this way,…
Assessing Urban-Humanitarian Encounters in Northern Lebanon
In this post, Estella Carpi examines the interface between ‘the urban’ and the humanitarian system in the small urban centre of Halba, in order to shed light on the antagonistic and, at times, collaborative relationships between local authorities, local and refugee labourers, and international humanitarian agencies. If you find this piece of interest, please also…
There will always be a vendor before and after the picture
This piece continues a series of poetic responses to photographs taken by Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh during a field-trip to Baddawi refugee camp and the neighbourhood of Jebel al-Baddawi in North Lebanon, and to a range of neighbourhoods in Beirut in March-April 2018. Written by Refugee Hosts Writer-in-Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,…
Mobility, Hope and the ‘Appropriation’ of Space: Reflections from a PhotoVoice Project
Typically, photographs of and about displaced peoples focus on individual suffering victims, acts of individualised resilience, or tropes that resonate with the wider genre of humanitarian narratives. As a result, the Refugee Hosts project has adopted what Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh has termed a "Spaces and Places, Not Faces" approach to refugee-photography. As Michelle Lokot explores in…
Employment and pension rights in the context of the localisation of aid agenda
Introductory reflection by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Refugee Hosts PI and UCL Through the Localisation of Aid agenda, the international community has committed to support 'locally-based' actors who play a key role in responding to people affected by conflict and displacement. Indeed, as we have been exploring in our Localisation of Aid blog series, nationally- and locally-based…
Anti-Syrian banners and graffiti in context: Racism, counter-racism and solidarity for refugees in Lebanon
By Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Refugee Hosts PI and UCL In the run up to the Lebanese elections on 6 May 2018, national and international media and human rights organisations have denounced the appearance of anti-Syrian banners across Beirut. Reading “The day will come when we tell the Syrians: gather your things and everything you stole, and…
A daily rhythm inside which time can grow…
This piece continues a series of poetic responses to photographs taken by Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh during a field-trip to Baddawi refugee camp and the neighbourhood of Jebel al-Baddawi in North Lebanon, and to a range of neighbourhoods in Beirut in March-April 2018. Written by Refugee Hosts Writer-in-Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and/or PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,…
Erasure
This is the first in a series of poetic responses to photographs taken by Refugee Hosts PI Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh during a field-trip to Baddawi refugee camp and the neighbourhood of Jebel al-Baddawi in North Lebanon, and to a range of neighbourhoods in Beirut in March-April 2018. Written by Refugee Hosts Writer-in-Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and/or PI Dr…
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