Local Community Experiences of Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey
How can a focus on material culture help us better understand the ways that displaced people navigate the challenges of urban life? In this piece, William Montieth explores the (in)visibilities of refugees through the joint lenses of urban economies, and material culture. Through the wax fabric (kitenge) industry in Kampala (Uganda), Congolese refugees are rendered not…
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…
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…
Accounting for the roles of local communities is a key aim of our project, and of the 'Localisation of Aid' agenda more broadly. However, as a result of the mainstream narratives that pervade the literature on conflict-induced displacement, efforts to properly engage with the local have been held back by a failure to fully recognise…
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 […]
This article by Stefano Fogliata examines the intertwined trajectories of Palestinian refugees fleeing from the Syrian conflict who have found shelter in the recently rehabilitated Nahr el-Bared camp in North Lebanon. Investigating such a phenomenon, and experiences of diverse encounters between new and established refugee communities, is key to our Refugee Hosts project in light of the growing prevalence of overlapping displacements in…
Between 10th - 15th March, the P21 Gallery in Somers Town, London will be hosting a spatial installation, Space of Refuge, which has emerged out of extensive fieldwork by Samar Maqusi, a PhD student at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), who has also contributed to the Refugee Hosts blog (see here and here). Samar's research in Lebanon and Jordan investigates…
By Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff, University College London In the aftermath of the 2011 Syrian revolution and in the midst of an ongoing war, what does loss mean for Syrians living in Southern Turkey ? How is this loss experienced, and how does it affect Syrians’ everyday lives in Turkey? Those are some of the questions I examined…
Urban Warfare, Resilience and Resistance: Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015) by Dominic Davies, University of Oxford How can different kinds of cultural performance and production reconstruct new forms of social cohesion across cities scarred by physical and psychological boundaries? Comics (often known in an academic context as ‘graphic novels’), are becoming an increasingly popular form through…
In an article published today in a special issue of Forced Migration Review on 'Local Communities: first and last providers of protection' (issue 53), Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh draws on her ongoing research into the experiences of local communities hosting refugees in the Middle East to interrogate the widespread assumption that the local communities hosting refugees are composed of settled and established groups of citizens.
Refugee Hosts 
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