Refugees’ home-making practices as assemblages: material & symbolic features of housing settlements in the camp

Abstract

Scholars often conceptualize the refugee camp as a humanitarian space (Agier, 2010) or space of protection (Ticktin, 2011), constructed by host governments and humanitarian agencies. However, in such framings, camp dwellers are often seen as passive recipients, isolated from any opportunity to cultivate a sense of belonging. This perception is reinforced by institutional accounts and reports that overlook refugees’ everyday spatial practices to reshape their environments, resulting in not only obscuring how refugees actively reconfigure camp spaces through home-making, but also contributing to spatial interventions that feel imposed and disconnected from lived realities, precluding avenues for belonging. This paper explores how Palestinian refugees construct the camp both spatially and temporally through everyday home-making practices that imbue the camp with meaning and attachment. To achieve this, I utilize the assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, DeLanda, 2006, McFarlane, 2009, Dovey, 2010) as the analytical approach to better understand home-making as an open-ended process, analyzing the material and symbolic features of housing settlements in the camp. The study adopts a bottom-up methodology that combines empirical and archival research to investigate three Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan: Baqa’a, Al-Husn, and Talbiyeh, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork based on interviews, direct observation, and graphic journaling. This study argues that although camps are initially shaped by institutional planning, refugees’ home-making practices reshape their development over time. This dynamic interplay challenges static institutional layouts, showing how refugees’ modifications redefine both spatial form and social meaning of the camp. It also highlights how refugee agency actively co-produces the evolving camp beyond its original intent.