Being/longing: visualizing belonging with Palestinian refugee children

ABSTRACT

Rejecting theorizations of refugee camps as humanitarian spaces of exception and bare life, recent research has emphasized how camps are sites of material struggle, and how refugees are agential political subjects. While valuable, this research bifurcates between the material dwellings of refugee camps on one hand and the political subjectivity of refugees on the other. In contrast, this paper examines how Palestinian refugees reproduce a sense of collective belonging within the physical space of the camp and through material practices of care. This research centers the voices of Palestinian children to understand how they view their inherited refugee identities in the context of multi-generational displacement. Using participatory digital storytelling, this research illustrates how, for some Palestinian refugee children, a sense of longing for a future return to their past homeland motivates acts of care in the present that produces a sense of belonging in the camp. The creative agency that refugee youth demonstrate in articulating this entangled temporality of belonging challenges top-down models of youth socialization and refugee subjectivity. The importance of visual and narrative practices in reproducing refugee-ness suggests a wider role for creative methods in research with refugees. This paper introduces place-based digital storytelling as one such method.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• children
• youth
• belonging
• visual methods
• digital storytelling

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude for the young people who participated in this project as well as their parents and the youth centre staff. This research would not have been possible were it not for their creativity, energy, and dedication. I would also like to thank Elon University’s new faculty funding for supporting this research. In addition, my thanks go to Banu Gokariksel and Safia Swimelar for their comments and encouragement and for their invitation to present this paper to students and colleagues, who also provided valuable feedback and helpful questions. Likewise, I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided such helpful comments. Finally, thanks go to my family for their love and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ As the US Congress proposed minimizing the “demographic threat” to Israel by redefining who is a refugee and, thus, who has a right to return, the Israeli Knesset bolstered Israel’s official status as a Jewish state by passing the nation-state law in July 2018, defining Israel as the national homeland for its Jewish citizens alone (Knesset, 2018). Both legislative move sent clear signals about who belongs where.