Dear All,

This year's American Anthropological Association meetings will be held in
New Orleans Nov. 20-24. Karin Norman (U. Stockholm) and I are trying to
organize a panel on "Transitory spaces under surveillance: ethnographies of
the social life of refugee camps". We would be interested in hearing from
anyone who does research in camps, reception centres, or other "organized
spaces" where refugees, IDPs, demobilized soldiers, or returnees live. I
attach the abstract to this message. We welcome expressions of interest from
anthropologists or social scientists in related fields, and hope that you
can be enticed to participate!

The deadline for submission of abstracts is March 31, so we have a little -
but not too much - time to get our application ready.

If you are interested, please send a proposed paper title and abstract to me
at: [log in to unmask]

Thank you.

Laura Hammond


Attachment:

Transitory spaces under surveillance: ethnographies of the social life of
refugee camps

As part of globalizing processes, migration, diasporas, and transnational
relations are prominent research issues among anthropologists. Less
ethnographic and theoretical attention has been given to the concrete social
life within the social, spatial, and political bounds of the refugee camp.
However, globalization is not only about voluntary migrations of persons, or
the flow of commodities and cultural ideas. It is as much about the forced
migration of millions of people who spend years of their lives in the
conceptually ambiguous 'transitory spaces' of refugee camps.

Refugee camps vary depending on the political, economic and social
structural contexts. Some camps are temporarily erected shelters, as the
camps organized a few years ago in Macedonia and Albania for the deported
Kosovo Albanians; others develop into more or less permanent settlements,
poignant examples being the Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan and the
Somalis in Kenya. In Western Europe and the US, refugee camps are not
generally conceptualized in terms of 'camps', but rather as 'refugee
reception centers' or the like. Nonetheless, the different refugee camps or
centers have certain problematic features in common. They stand under
national or international surveillance and refugee life is controlled and
circumscribed in ways that differ from the situation of the local
population. Refugees are either barred from the open labor market or used as
cheap labor, they rarely have the same social, legal and political rights as
local citizens. However, due to international aid policy, refugees may also
turn out to be better sustained than the local population.

Studies of displaced persons and refugeeness as such have raised questions
about the meanings of 'national belonging' and the ideologies of 'roots' and
'normality'. Recent research (e g Malkki) reminds us that an 'ontological
trope' for being a social person in much 'Western' national thinking is to
'have roots', to belong to a specific place. To be a refugee and to live in
a refugee camp stands in opposition to this 'normality' - refugees have or
are assumed to have lost contact with their 'roots' and so risk losing their
position as full social persons. In many camps, the social organization may
help to minimize these losses and may even give rise to new social bonds
that strengthen individual and group identity. Identities and meanings of
'home' are changeable constituents of social experience. Studying refugee
camp life can shed theoretical light on processes of identity formation,
meanings of place and memory, emotional experiences of displacement, the
workings of state interventions in everyday life and the development of
relations of power, domination and authority. Such studies also raise
methodological and ethically intricate problems of participation and
observation.

Through the comparative use of ethnographic accounts, the aim of this panel
is to discuss these and related issues. Specific questions may revolve
around concrete descriptions of how the social life of refugee camps shifts
and changes in relation to gender, age, class, ethnicity, time-span, and in
relation to local residents and (inter)national organizations.

Karin Norman, Dept of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University
[log in to unmask]

Laura Hammond, Dept of International Development, Community and Environment,
Clark University [log in to unmask]


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