Negotiating Homelessness. Rethinking the Human Condition in the Refugee Camp

Abstract:Refugee camps remain one of the primary responses to a flux of forced human displacement across borders due to conflict and natural disasters. They are for the most part deployed by NGOs and nation states as isolated and transitory infrastructures which provide shelter where needed. But they also effect a state of 'limbo' with regards to legal, economic and social status - this experience is particularly acute where camps have a prolonged existence. Refugee camps have long existed throughout the Middle East and in many parts of Asia and Africa, but, since the 2015 refugee 'crisis' in Europe, there has been growing debate about the use of camps and, more pertinently, about what these built spaces mean to and imply for the lived-experience of their inhabitants. With the increasing visibility of refugee camps and the renewed political debate about forced displacement, this doctoral research sets out to critically analyse the vast literature on refugee camps in order to examine how the concepts of home and homelessness relate to the built environment. Therefore, it sets out to reinterpret and to reconceptualise home, being 'at home', and the making of homes by looking to situations that are defined by their homelessness. To achieve this, the approach of this project is threefold. First, it embarks on a study of the literature available on the architecture of refugee camps to illustrate the complexity and multi-dimensionality of these spaces. While refugee camps are more often than not examined as objects of biopolitical care and as artefacts of state control, they can also be spaces of immense activity, creativity and agency as displaced people appropriate and transform the sites to accommodate their social and material needs, tastes and expressions of identity. A growing number of scholars in architectural and ethnographic studies therefore argue that these 'hostile' environments, built as temporary responses to homelessness, are in a constant process of becoming homes. The opposing sides to this debate brings to light the ambivalence of these spaces and underscores the need to reconceive being 'at home' as being either in a place of undisputed security and comfort or in one's place of origin. The particular goal of this approach is thus to shed light on the multiple ways of seeing the architecture of refugee camps as a form of basic shelter, as an artefact of statecraft and exclusion, and perhaps even as a homeplace, however temporary. Second, to understand how refugee camps become homes, this project critically examines the concept of home in terms of a critical phenomenology of dwelling. The benefits of a phenomenological analysis can be found in its emphasis on lived-experience which identifies home and being 'at home' or dwelling as core to the human condition of being-in-the-world. And yet, the tradition of phenomenology operates within a limited and privileged view of human existence such that it rarely considers in concrete detail how people live in the hostile conditions of somewhere like a refugee camp. And when it does, human life is defined by a lack: a situation of deprivation and passivity. Alternatively, by incorporating insights from sociological and anthropological studies on the relationship between forced migration and home, this project disentangles multiple facets of dwelling in order to draw out the significance of everyday spatial practices and broader political institutions to the making of homes. Therefore, as a critical phenomenology of dwelling, the project intends to reveal and interrogate the concrete social and political conditions, institutions and assumptions that structure lived experiences of home, ultimately with the intention to better the lives of people who are marginalised, oppressed and suffering under the current situation. The third aspect of the approach ventures then into a reformulation of Hannah Arendt's writings on political activity qua human plurality and the human condition as a critical phenomenology of dwelling. This moreover seeks to reconceptualise how human dwelling and an understanding of human dignity emerge in relation to an intersubjective process of negotiation with one's geographical location and material context. A phenomenological reading of Arendt's writings will therefore explore how phenomenological concepts such as worldliness, appearance and lived experience are central to her understandings of political and 'practical' phenomena such as protests, revolutions, authoritarianism, and citizenship. Furthermore, it will underscore the relationship between dwelling and a politics of action in the creation of spaces of meaning which are contingent on human activity and the public visibility of that activity to individualise someone or a group of people in the world. In this way, this research endeavours to understand how the basic phenomenological premises of being-in-the-world and of intersubjectivity are politicised by Arendt so as to imply that what constitutes human dwelling is not individual projects but world-building. World-building has the capacity to beget multiple and diverse perspectives on a topic by opening up to a public questions on how the world looks and what should be seen as part of it. In clinging to simple and idealistic associations of home, and in presuming that homelessness is indicative of a one-dimensional abject and passive state, there is a danger of rendering invisible what forcibly displaced people do to create meaningful spaces for themselves as part of a wider community in the face of structural violence and methods of control. By making these activities visible and by understanding them in terms of dwelling qua world-building, this research lays the theoretical groundwork for more critical methods of support and, as stated, of thinking with the inhabitants of refugee camps. Therefore, by developing a critical phenomenology of dwelling through Arendt's distinct interpretation of the human condition, this research offers a way to perceive and thereby conceive of various activities and the things that they produce in refugee camps as political, which is to say, as part and parcel in the creation of a public realm and therefore of a common world.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open