“OutLaw Yard”

Abstract

Media coverage of migrant and refugee camps often concerns not everyday life in camps, but violence or a camp's outright destruction. These portrayals risk inscribing camps into public memory as sites of danger and criminality, or of vulnerability without agency. What methods of engaging with a camp's aftermath and its representation might enable more complex understandings of the reality of life in camps? We engage the camp as a site of inscription to reconsider the role of objects, structures, and writing left behind when a camp is destroyed or evacuated. Our proposed methodology of reading traces recognizes these objects and representations as testimonial inscriptions that counter erasure and that record frictions of (in)visibility and space, attesting to the camp as a site not of abjection, but of negotiation.