Speculating with Care: Learning from an Experimental Educational Program in the West Bank

Abstract

In 2012, I was involved in the experimental study program, Campus in Camps, which is located in the West Bank and which brought together 15 third-generation refugees to study the contemporary condition of Palestinian refugee camps and to speculate about their potential futures. In this article, I draw on my experience at Campus in Camps in order to reflect on how design and speculation can be activated by designers and non-designers to speculate with care about the matters of their own lives. To explore the potential held by the design speculations produced at Campus in Camps, I draw on the work of feminist philosopher Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa around “matters of care”. To think about the aspects of care and speculation activated throughout the different phases of the educational program, I mobilise Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphor that compares speculation to the flight of an airplane.

Keywords:

• Care
• pedagogy
• refugees
• spatial practice
• speculation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Unit of Play at Goldsmiths, University of London, for having invited me in 2014 to think about the relation of speculation to the kind of design work I engage in: Alex Wilkie, Michael Guggenheim, and Jennifer Gabrys gave thoughtful comments on a very early draft during a writing workshop and on further iterations of the text. I also would like to thank Carl Di Salvo for his precious comments and for his encouragement to keep on thinking about the connection between feminist notions of care and speculative design work. Moreover, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue of Architectural Theory Review for their detailed feedback on the submitted manuscript. But, above all, I would like to thank the people of Campus in Camps for the many conversations during my time there and Alessandro Petti for keeping our conversations going since; I hope that my reflections here are a contribution to the legacy of this experimental study program.

Notes

1. Anthony Dunne, “Hertzian Tales: An Investigation into the Critical and Aesthetic Potential of the Electronic Product as a Post-Optimal Object”, Royal College of Art, 1998; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Cambridge, CA/MA: MIT Press, 2013; Bill Gaver, “Designing for Homo Ludens”, 13 Magazine, no. 12, June 2002; James Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation”, Digital Creativity, 24, no. 1 (2013), 11–35.

2. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, “Futuristic Gizmos, Conservative Ideals: On (Speculative) Anachronistic Design”, Modes of Criticism, http://modesofcriticism.org/futuristic-gizmos-conservative-ideals/ (accessed February 27, 2015).

3. Cameron Tonkinwise, “Design Fictions About Critical Design”, Modes of Criticism, http://modesofcriticism.org/design-fictions-about-critical-design/ (accessed March 2, 2015).

4. Kye Askins, “Participatory Geographies”, The International Encyclopedia of Geography, 1–7.

5. María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Feminist Knowledge Politics in Situated Zones: A Different Hi/Story of Knowledge Construction”, 2002, http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/puig.htm (accessed February 21, 2014).

6. Marta Malo de Molina, “Common Notions”, 2004, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en and http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en (accessed October 12, 2012).

7. Campus in Camps, “Homepage”, 2012, http://www.campusincamps.ps/ (accessed November 10, 2017).

8. The 15 participants, aged between 23 and 35 years, were Marwa Allaham, Qussay Abu Aker, Alaa Al Homouz, Saleh Khannah, Shadi Ramadan, Ahmad Lahham, Aysar Dawoud, Bisan Al Jaffarri, Nedaa Hamouz, Naba Al Assi, Mohammed Abu Alia, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Isshaq Al Barbary, Ayat Al Turshan, and Murad Owdah. They all had BA degrees from Palestinian universities, in subjects ranging from social work to management.

9. DAAR, “Revolving Door Occupancy”, DAAR (blog), http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/revolving-door/ (accessed December 16, 2008).

10. Brave New Alps, “Decode Jerusalem: An Alternative Travel Guide to East Jerusalem”, 2007, http://www.decodejerusalem.net/ (accessed February 14, 2016).

11. Didier Debaise, Un Empirisme Spéculatif: Lecture de Procès et Réalité de Whitehead, Paris: Libraire Philosophique, 2006, 25.

12. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: The Free Press, 1978, 5.

13. Erich Kästner, Das Fliegende Klassenzimmer, Wien: Buchgemeinschaft Jung-Donauland, 1938.

14. Sandi Hilal is a Palestinian from Beit Sahour, a municipality next to Bethlehem. She studied architecture and urbanism in Italy, where she met the Italian Alessandro Petti. They have produced work on the Palestinian territories since 2003 and, since 2006, live and work in Beit Sahour.

15. Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture After Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.

16. DAAR, “Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency—About”, http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/about/ (accessed 12 March 2014).

17. The popular committees have 20 to 30 members who are appointed through processes internal to each camp. They are not part of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Their role is to lobby for improving the conditions in the camps and to make sure the right of return is kept on the agenda of the PA. For this purpose, the committees are networked across different camps. Within the camps, the committees act to settle disputes and help to mediate other internal issues.

18. Campus in Camps, “Camp Improvement Program—Talk by Sandi Hilal”, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcGK6T1Br9 M (accessed February 2, 2015).

19. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things”, Social Studies of Science, 41, no. 1 (2011), 85–106.

20. Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu, “The Politics of Care in Technoscience”, Social Studies of Science, 45, no. 5 (1 October 2015), 625–641.

21. Erik Bordeleau and Isabelle Stengers, “The Care of the Possible: Isabelle Stengers Interviewed by Erik Bordeleau”, trans. Kelly Ladd, Scapegoat, no. 1 (2011), 16.

22. Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 18.

23. Campus in Camps was accredited by Al-Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Centre in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. It was financially supported by the GIZ Regional Social and Cultural Fund for Palestinian Refugees and Gaza Population on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in cooperation with UNRWA’s Camp Improvement Program.

24. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble”, Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Santa Cruz, 9 May 2014, https://vimeo.com/97663518 (accessed July 7, 2015).

25. The visual identity and website was designed by Petti and Hilal’s long-time Italian collaborator, Diego Segatto. The YouTube channel was managed by the Palestinian media expert, Ghassan Bannoura.

26. Campus in Camps and Grupo Contrafilé, “The Tree School”, 2014, www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Tree-School_Digital-Book_FINAL.pdf (accessed February 12, 2015).

27. Alessandro Petti, “Campus in Camps: Knowledge Production and Urban Interventions in Refugee Camps”, in Gautam Bhan, Smita Srinivas, and Vanessa Watson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South, New York: Routledge, 2017, 334–344.

28. For the full program of seminars, see the website of the program (Campus in Camps, 2012b), http://www.campusincamps.ps/ (accessed January 25, 2018).

29. Campus in Camps, “Campus in Camps—YouTube Channel”, https://www.youtube.com/user/campusincamps (accessed 5 February 2015).

30. This approach certainly relates to architectural pedagogies activated in other places and times, such as those enacted by the architectural research collective, Forensik Mimarlık (Pelin Tan, “Decolonizing Architectural Education: Towards an Effective Pedagogy”, in Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal (eds), The Social (Re)Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, New York: Routledge, 2017, 77–92), the informal learning network, The Eco Nomadic School (Böhm, Kathrin, Tom James, and Doina Petrescu, eds. Learn to Act: Introducing the Eco Nomadic School. Paris: aaa/peprav, 2017), and radical architecture movements in the 1960s and 1970s (Doucet, Isabelle. “Learning in the ‘Real’ World: Encounters with Radical Architecture (1960s and 1970s)”, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49, no. 1 (2017), 7–21).

31. Isabelle Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism”, Subjectivity, 22, no. 1 (2008), 44.

32. Isshaq Al Barbary and Aysar Al-Saifi, “Collective Dictionary: Commons 2”, January 2013, http://www.campusincamps.ps/projects/common-1/ (accessed February 16, 2015); Brave New Alps et al., “Collective Dictionary: Commons & Commoning”, October 2012, http://tinyurl.com/pc4v5mj (accessed February 16, 2015).

33. Bordeleau and Stengers, “Care of the Possible”, 17.

34. Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care”, 90.

35. Bordeleau and Stengers, “Care of the Possible”, 17.

36. Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains”, 40.

37. Nedaa Hamouz and Ayat Al Turshan, “The Square: Learning in the Common Space”, Campus in Camps, 2013, http://www.campusincamps.ps/projects/02-the-square/ (accessed February 16, 2015).

38. Saleh Khannah et al., “Relation”, Campus in Camps, January 2013, http://www.campusincamps.ps/projects/relation/ (accessed February 16, 2015).

39. In the book chapter, “Campus in Camps: Knowledge Production and Urban Interventions in Refugee Camps”, Alessandro Petti gives a more detailed account of what happened beyond the conclusion of the first two years of the educational program (2017).

40. Al-Badil is the most listened to independent non-profit organisation committed to protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons.

41. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse^TM: Feminism and Technoscience, New York/London: Routledge, 1997, 3.