Local Community Experiences of Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey
How do shared experiences of widowhood inform a sense of self and community among Palestinian and Syrian refugees living in Jordan? In this piece, Dina Zbeidy explores every-day lives in displacement, refugee-refugee relations, self-representation and spaces of refuge in Wihdat, a Palestinian camp east of Amman. In particular, she highlights the important social role that community spaces…
This soundscape of Athens, Greece, offers an evocative and immersive insight into sounds of everyday life in the city. Athens has become home to many refugees from Syria and elsewhere, who have brought with them new sounds documented in this piece. Engaging with spaces of refuge through sound is a method that can help us…
Below you can listen to two soundscapes recorded during Prof. Alastair Ager's recent fieldtrip to Hamra, a vibrant neighbourhood in Beirut which is home to a dynamic commercial and social scene in addition to many refugees from Syria. Such soundscapes offer an invaluable entry point to engage in a multi-sensory analysis of the social, economic and political…
In this piece, which draws on Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff's on-going fieldwork in Turkey, we are offered a glimpse of how loss, hope, memory and the future are navigated by Syrian refugees in the everyday. This quotidian lens provides an important antidote to the narratives of exceptionalism that typically colour media and policy responses to forced migration, unearthing diverse experiences of displacement, and…
On Wednesday 14 June 2017, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, PI of the Refugee Hosts project, joined a live TwitterChat with the ODI’s Humanitarian Policy Group and other experts in order to ask: are we doing enough for refugees? This chat was engaged with by over 25,000 people, making for a very exciting, interactive hour. Panelists involved […]
We need more nuanced evidence to help policymakers and practitioners better understand the roles that faith-based actors already play, and have the potential to play, in supporting refugees and forced migrants. Summarising existing evidence and key remaining questions presented in a policy note issued by our project partner the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith &…
Based on her research in Italy, in this piece Susanna Trotta argues that Italian FBOs' responses to the needs of peoples displaced around the Mediterranean are helping to counteract troubling trends in refugee status recognition, whilst also offering a model of 'replicability' capable of challenging the growing securitisation of refugee protection in the Global North. In…
Major international agencies including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have moved towards partnering with faith-based actors to support displaced persons. Despite this, concerns – and suspicions – remain about the nature and impact of faith-based responses to displacement, often stemming from negative assumptions about the relationship between religion and gender. These assumptions…
Rethinking Hospitality towards Syrian Refugees in Lebanon by Estella Carpi, University College London-Development Planning Unit & Save the Children-Humanitarian Affairs Team The discourse of ‘hospitality’ has both informed and reinforced the international response to the mass influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict. However, while unprecedented in scale – by the end…
In a recent piece published by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJUUR) as part of an Open Access 'Spotlight On' The Urban Refugee "Crisis", Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh highlights the urgency of examining refugees' positions, identities, beliefs and behaviours in relation to other groups of refugees. In essence, she argues that it is necessary to complement…
Refugee Hosts 
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