Panel 1: Researchers Examined

• "Blunders and Suspicious Behavior in Researching the Palestinian Camps" - Mahmoud Zeidan 

The scientific research of under-privileged communities that live through ‘exceptional’ circumstances is nothing new, and the reliance of the intelligence services on researchers to obtain information, from the inside, under the guise of research or humanitarian aid, is not unusual in the Arab world in general, and in the Palestinian camps in particular.

Recently, there has been a direct link between the magnitude of the difficulties experienced by Palestinian refugees in the Lebanese camps and the number of researchers visiting those camps. Additionally, the refugees’ attitudes towards researchers and research has changed as they become more resentful and defensive. This is due to several reasons. Firstly, the misconduct of researchers. Secondly, the absence of any improvements in the lives of the refugees due to the research undertaken. Finally, the selection of research topics that are often related to agendas of governments entrusted to seek solutions to the Palestinian refugees’ problem.

This paper presents my personal experience, as an activist in the Palestinian camps, where I worked with a large number of researchers and artists of various kinds throughout the past twenty years, (i.e., post-Oslo period until our present day). It will focus on the mistakes and blunders of researchers, as well as their potentially suspicious behavior that could be connected to foreign agendas and that I believe had a major effect on shaping the negative attitudes of the refugees towards the researchers and their research. 

Mahmoud Zeidan has an MA in Human Rights and Democratization and has been working as a specialist in education, human rights and protection. He developed special experience in curriculum and staff development, inclusive education and human rights based approach in strategic planning. Mr. Zeidan also has extensive experience in documentation and oral history. He cofounded and co-directed with Professor Diana Allan an oral history project: the 'Nakba Archive' (http://nakba-archive.org/), and a grassroots documentary initiative: ‘Lens on Lebanon’ (http://www.lensonlebanon.org/) 

• "The Invisible Hands in Knowledge Production" - Mohamad-Ali Nayel

Following years of assisting foreign researchers and journalists in producing knowledge from Palestinian refugee camps I was a witness and participant of the production of many research and journalistic anecdotes. More times than not the work I was involved in with researchers/journalists resulted in personal career building for the researcher/journalist and adding to the misleading industry of knowledge production. I saw that that kind of knowledge production added an additional dose of dehumanisation for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In this paper I rely on my first-hand experience assisting researchers to show how the act of knowledge production takes place. Irresponsible career building research means that ethical lines are blurred. It also means the conclusion of the research has been already established before the research started, thus what follows is the utilization of people’s lives to fill in the careerist research. However, Palestinian refugees have opened up their lives for research in the hope of forwarding their struggle. More times than not the kind of research I was involved in saw the camps as an open science lab with Palestinian refuges to experiment on.  This paper aims at examining this opportunistic research and journalistic approach to knowledge production and suggests that it ought to be reversed to serve the wellbeing of the camps and their Palestinian inhabitants.

Mohamad-Ali Nayel is a writer freelance journalist, fixer producer and translator based between London and Lebanon. He writes for Lebanese based and International English publications. In 2010 he decided to change his tools from fixer to writer and published his first critique here:  http://themoealibeirutvibes.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/the-incident-that-made-me-switch-my-tools/. Later on in 2011 Mohamad-Ali Nayel began his reporting on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon for Electronic Intifada: http://electronicintifada.net/people/moe-ali-nayel  . To read more by Mohamad-Ali Nayel most of his work can be found on his blog: http://themoealibeirutvibes.wordpress.com/.  You can follow him on @MoeAliN

They called me a refugee, they called me a researcher"

Alaa Mustafa

 

The first time I visited a Palestinian refugee camp I went to see the family of my friend Rabih, who is twenty three years old, married to Nahi and has a daughter named Alma. After lunch, he asked me: “What do you want to inquire about?” I laughed and told him that I do not have questions. He chuckled and repeated his question. So, I said: “Why do I have to ask you questions rather than you asking me?” to which he smiled.

At that time, I couldn’t quite comprehend why he thought that I only came to ask questions. I only wanted to visit a Palestinian camp. However, I understood Rabih’s behavior once I read about the over-research of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the impact of these researchers.

I personally prefer to examine researchers rather than the researched in this paper. I rely on interviews that I carried out with researchers who worked in the Palestinian camps, and on a critical analysis of their studies. I also rely on personal accounts that various researchers published about their experiences in the camps.

My primary interest in this paper is to examine how researchers involved in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon perceive their role and impact on the community and how they view their research in the current academic, political, and international context. Finally, I ask what research methods they rely on to produce their knowledge of the camps and of themselves.

 

Alaa Mustafa, is an MA student in Anthropology. She also studied Media and has a one-year experience working with Burj-Al Ahmar South Bedouins, Halayeb and Shlatin areas. She visited Lebanon a number of times, participated twice in Janana camp, and worked with the Syrian refugees in Turkey and Aleppo at the beginning of the Syrian revolution. She was an activist in the Egyptian revolution and participated in the election campaign during the first elections. She traveled to various Arab and African countries and is interested in research in Arab countries, precisely methods of producing knowledge in modern history. She currently works as a teaching assistant at the American University in Cairo. She has experience in documentation and writing for electronic publications.

 

11am – 1pm: Panel 2: Researchers’ responsibility, impact, and effect

 

On the Politics of Fieldwork with Palestinians:  The Researched Speak Back

 

Mayssoun Sukarieh

 

The paper discusses the over research phenomenon as narrated by Shatila residents. It analyses the concerns voiced by Shatila residents by focusing on three tensions. In particular: the relationship of research to expectations and promises of social change; the tensions between Palestine and the Palestinians’ alienation from researcher practices as well as questions and misgivings about researcher identities and agendas; and finally, the impact of research on social relationships and identities within the Shatila camp itself. The paper is written in a story form, reflecting on certain aspects as also witnessed during work in Shatila.

 

Bio

 

Research with/out Responsibility: The Role of Academics in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Lebanon

Anne Irfan

 

Academic researchers’ long-running interest in studying the Palestinian refugee camps reflects the latter’s historical centrality within national and diaspora politics, which has been most pronounced in Lebanon. Fieldwork in the camps has intensified in the post-1982 period, as the Palestinians’ position in Lebanon has become increasingly marginalized. This paper examines the problems that this research interest can generate for the camp communities themselves, and resulting tensions with researchers. It argues that in order for research projects to be constructive and fruitful, much greater emphasis needs to be placed on building partnerships between researchers and camp communities, such that the latter can be an active participant in shaping how their own stories are told.

 

Bio

Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practices

Anaheed Al-Hardan

 

This article builds on Indigenous and decolonial theorists’ and activists’ contention that European imperialism and colonialism are inseparable from modern knowledge production, and that the power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicated in the contemporary coloniality of the world. It examines the power relations inherent in imperialism and colonialism as they unfolded in the “before,” “during,” and “after” of a research project on Palestinian refugees that was conceptualized and initiated in the Anglo-Irish academy. It asks what kind of research can researchers, who are structurally positioned within the academies of the former/current imperialist powers and their allies, engage in while carrying out research in communities that are on the other end of the imperial and colonial equation. It concludes by discussing what the possibility of a decolonizing research practice in Palestinian refugee communities may begin to look like during the Palestinians’ settler-colonized and stateless present.

 

Bio

Anaheed Al-Hardan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016).

 

 

‘You want to solve our problems?’ Reflections on conducting fieldwork in Nahr el-Bared camp

Perla Issa

The starting point of this presentation is the realization that a discussion of research ethics is missing from Palestinian refugee studies. This is surprising considering the protracted nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestinian refugees have been in exile for over six decades and a large body of knowledge across a variety of disciplinary fields have been dedicated to their study. Yet little research has been devoted to investigate the research’s impact on the researched community. The sheer importance of recounting the Palestinian story, of documenting the myriad systems of oppression that Palestinians have faced and of analyzing the numerous conflicts, seduced academics into believing that our scholarly work was intrinsically political and of undisputable value for Palestinians and their cause. Innocently, we believed that our commitment to the cause was sufficient, we did not preoccupy ourselves with evaluating our relationship with the affected community and the impact our research has upon it.

This presentation discusses my personal experiences conducting fieldwork in Nahr el-Bared camp and the questions and dilemmas they gave rise to. It suggests that the way that Palestinian refugees experience or perceive researchers today is closely connected to two past experiences that shaped them: their involvement in the thawra and the subsequent abandonment of the leadership as well as their more recent relations with NGOs in the camps. It draws parallels between these experiences and explores how researchers appear to be the newest version of ‘misery profiteers’ following along the footsteps of a long list of people who approached camp residents promising an improvement in their lives when the only lives improved are those of the researchers themselves.

Bio

 

2:30pm – 3:30pm: Panel 3: Research impact: technical brokers and digital maps

 

How Palestinian activists use research on the Palestinian camps: Technical resources, vocabularies of motives and politicisation in the Beirut camps

 

Alex Mahoudeau

The period following the 1980, the departure of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation from Beirut and the War of the Camps in Lebanon has seen the rise of non-governmental organisations in the country’s refugee camps. Whether or not the development of NGOs in the Palestinian refugee camps is a cause of depoliticisation has been extensively debated. For some, the decline of a traditional political system is the cause of a collapse of civic engagement in the camps, while others argue that NGOs allow a form of politicisation. By looking at the organisations “from the inside”, this discussion will focus on these organisations’ activists who have had access to scholarship on the camps and in social sciences, here called “technical brokers.” We will describe the action of these technical brokers within the camps to frame a specific discourse in these organisations and show how the relation of that category of activists to the camps and to technical resources has influenced this evolution.

Bio:

 

Liquifying Social Capital. On the political affordances of digital mediation in a Palestinian refugee camp

Monika Halkort

Drawing upon long term observational fieldwork on the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared, one of the largest Palestinian settlements in Lebanon, this paper discusses the political affordances of digital technologies in documenting and preserving the histories of Palestinian refugees. The main focus of my discussion will be the speculative potential of digital mapping and information practices. Speculation here refers to the eventfulness of code and data in constituting objects, materials, designs and bodies as social and historical actors and the ways in which they mediate trajectories of life and decision making along which individual and collective futures unfold.

Digital mediation, I will suggest, never merely documents or represents social situations but fundamentally transforms them as it organises perceptions, movements and action potentials alongside codes sets of probability. Mapping social life worlds, in this sense, involves not just the conversion of lived and embodied memory alongside new registers of visibility and legitimation but implies a dynamic modulation of individual and collective memories, life worlds and expectations that allow for both - new forms of “probalistic containment” as well as new modes of resistance and escape.

Bio

 

4pm – 5pm: Keynote speaker: Rosemary Sayigh

 

Towards economic ethnographies of Palestinian refugee camps

My presentation starts with the assertion that the reproduction over time of the Palestinian refugee camps is a national political necessity until such time as a just settlement is achieved. From this departure I argue that there is an ethical/political obligation on Palestinian national institutions to make the global public aware of the meaning of the camps -- their production by Israeli colonialism, the hardships they embody, and the claims to justice and restoration that their people uphold. Simultaneously I propose that this obligation on national institutions to carry on advocacy for the camps is accompanied by an equally important ethical/political obligation to enhance camp conditions in all ways possible, for example through supporting educational and cultural resources, or through engaged research along the lines suggested by Linda T. Smith in her Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples [1999].  Concern for the reproduction of the camp over time leads me to question the widely held assumption that UNRWA will unfailingly and permanently provide basic care and services. UNRWA funding is threatened by donor fatigue, Israeli propaganda and neo-liberalism. Thus camp economies need to be better understood so as to target interventions with more efficacy. Economic ethnographies with a focus on indigenous forms of solidarity and on women’s economic activism may hold a key to how camp households cope with host state-instituted poverty. In this context I will cite women’s use of mobile telephony in the ‘Third World’ to access markets.

 

Bio

 

9am – 10:30am:                  Consultation: Research Ethics and Vulnerable Populations: Responsibilities of Individual Researchers, Research Institutions and Universities

-        Seteney Shami, Founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS),

-        Mudar Kassis, Chair of the Birzeit University - Research Ethics Committee

Panel Description:

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) and the Birzeit University - Research Ethics Committee jointly launched a pilot project convening experts and scholars around research ethics in the Arab region with a focus on the social sciences. Supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the pilot project aims at promoting a regional reflection on appropriate research ethics guidelines, practices and structures.

ACSS/Birzeit will present the tools and guidelines they have developed at the level of the research institution (ACSS) and at the level of the university (Birzeit University). Attendees will be asked how to develop these tools further in order to ensure their relevancy and efficacy in the varying contexts in the Arab Region. The discussion will be framed as thinking about what ‘vulnerable populations’ mean in these differing contexts.

Dr. Mudar Kassis will then present an ethical research case study from Palestine, thinking through various universal/context-specific ethical considerations and questions.

Bios:

Seteney Shami serves as founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), a regional nonprofit organization headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon. She has also been with the Social Science Research Council since July 1999 and is director of the Middle East and North Africa program as well as the Inter-Asia Program. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

11am – 1pm: Panel 4: Engaging the community? Potentials, Challenges, and Limitations

 

The Palestinian Oral History Archive

Kaoukab Chebaro, Hana Sleiman

The presentation will discuss the Palestinian Oral History Archive Project along three axes, highlighting the communal and rooted nature, origin, and impetus of the project. The first is a survey of the collection and genealogy of the project: historiography, methodology and provenance of the collection, brief summary and rationale of AUB’s involvement (goals, wished for impact and hopes). The second is a brief description of the workflow, methodology, plans and key decisions for planning and implementing the project, and their effect on the desired impact. Lastly, we’ll discuss the desired or planned impact of this project: who is the targeted audience? How do we foresee this project to be used, integrated into and reinforcing various discourses and disciplines? How do we foresee this project to be transformative?

Bios

Kaoukab Chebaro currently serves as Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at Jafet Library, AUB. Kaoukab holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, as well as a Masters in Library Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the AUB Libraries in 2011, she served as the Middle East and Islamic Studies Librarian at Columbia University.

 

 

Negotiating Academic Research, Political Activism and Professional Practice in Palestinian Camps.

Ismael Sheikh Hassan -

This presentation aims to reflect on the experiences of activist-researchers and activist professionals in conditions of Palestinian camps in Lebanon (and other host-states), while comparing it to some other experiences of prolonged crisis around the world. This research is drawn from some of my personal experiences as an academic, researcher and professional who has engaged in various Palestinian camps through different forms of crisis, campaigns and projects. It aims to elaborate on both the tensions and possibilities of these relationships (between academia and professional practice on one side, and activism on the other) as well as on their different forms.

The presentation will focus on experiences that emerged in the post-90s, an era that has been characterized by the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement. It thus elaborates on the struggles for the emergence of new and different forms of meaningful activism in an era where the prevalence of liberation politics and Palestinian political parties had diminished in comparison to the previous decades.

The presentation also chooses/focuses on the field of “urbanism” as a case study of a discipline that has encompassed both researchers and professionals in Palestinian camps. The field is specifically interesting given the rise of projects and forms of activism in Palestinian camps during the post-90s, that had focused on different notions of urban improvements (urban services, reconstruction, urban upgrading etc). What also makes this field particularly relevant to this discussion is its interdisciplinarity and bridging between theoretical discourses (ex: urban theory) and action (through urban planning, architecture).

Bio:

The Ties that Bind: Research and Mapping in Bourj Al Shamali Refugee Camp

Claudia Martinez Mansell 

In the summer of 1998, I spent a couple of months teaching English and computers as a volunteer at Bourj Al Shamali refugee camp. Since then, I have returned on various occasions to volunteer and visit friends. During my last visit in 2012, I was asked to help on a dream of many in the camp - to create a green public space in the camp. The population of the camp, originally from an agricultural environment in Hawla and Tiberias, has increasingly grown detached from the land. The little remaining connection they have comes via their occasional work as day labourers in the lush fields around. Limited investment has been made to improve conditions in the camp, and hardly any plants, whether for food or pleasure, are grown there. In a metaphorical sense, in other words, nobody wants to grow any roots in the camp. But this political and spatial practice of the right to return in Bourj Al Shamali is actually undermining the common identity it claims to protect, for it sacrifices the refugees' common agricultural heritage (one commonly depicted around the camp in paintings of traditional harvests).

To start we needed a map of the camp, but soon I discovered that obtaining a map seemed to be an impossible task to achieve. For a variety of reasons, these are not available, and if they are, they are very rudimentary and/or not widely shared.

This paper will explain the mapping project undertaken in Bourj Al Shamali refugee camp by a group of youth with a simple camera and a balloon full of helium, as a first step in the creation of a green space in the camp. Balloon mapping is a low-cost and simple technique to produce high-resolution aerial images of an area. This “do-it yourself satellite imagery” was developed and promoted by Public Lab.

The paper will then draw on the lessons learned from the initiative. As mapping refugee camps is politically sensitive, and refugee populations are often uneasy about the security implications and the uses to which the maps may be put, the presentation will raise some ethical issues involved in the project.

Bio

Claudia Martinez Mansell is a humanitarian worker and independent researcher. She has worked for over ten years with the United Nations, and has lived for extended periods in Kosovo, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories, Sudan, and Yemen. Her research interests are concerned with protracted crises, urbanization and critical examinations of the landscapes created by humanitarian crises and interventions.

She first visited Bourj Al Shamali in 1998, when she volunteered at the vocational center in the camp. She has since kept returning to visit friends and work on various creative projects and recent efforts to green the camp.

Reflection in Practice: Collaborative ethnography in Post Conflict Nahr el Bared

Azadeh Sobout

 

This paper acknowledges that the majority of the researchers who have done ‘research with refugees’ have merely involved them on the account of their language abilities or facilitation skills, while refugees’ perspective have been rarely incorporated in defining research questions, data analysis and report writing (Moran, & Temple, 2006). The paper invests on the ‘critical collaborative ethnography’ as a way of ‘doing ethnography ‘with’ people rather than ‘on’ or ‘about’ people’ (Bhattacharya, 2008). Accordingly, it elaborates the significance of alternative methodologies such as reflective observations, oral testimony, participatory visual workshops and focus group discussions in validating the existing official narratives, while ‘establish[ing] greater mutuality’ between researcher and participants (Krulfeld in Warner, 1998).

Reflecting on the methodological insights, challenges and opportunities that emerged during my field research in the Nahr-el Bared refugee camp (May-Aug 2015), the paper explores the potential of ethnography in reconciling the macro-level official discourse with the micro-level local experience in the post-conflict context. In doing so, it explores the emerging theoretical foundations and analytic understandings formed in ethnographic study of Palestinian refugee camps, while offering a reflexive analysis on the innovative tools developed in grassroots engagement and collaboration with the community. Similarly, it explores how the emerging forms of ethnography can incorporate informal mechanisms and grassroots networks to promote justice, recognition, self-determination, voice and agency in researching with Palestinian refugees.

And finally, I draw on my positionalities as a researcher, volunteer and practitioner, and the changing politics of representation and interaction in the field to highlight the dynamics of research in the refugee camps. I reflect on my personal research journey, reflexive learning and personal transformation to explore how ethnography as a form of collective learning can provide new direction to research in Palestinian refugee camps.

 

Bio

I have an educational background in social planning and urban development. Carrying out extensive fieldwork experience with refugee and marginalised communities over the past 10 years, I have developed interest to pursue new frontiers in refugee research and urban planning. Affiliated to Transitional Justice Institute as a PhD candidate, my current research focuses on the interplay between collaborative planning and urban governance, and the dynamism of grass root planning initiatives and their potential for promoting refugee’s rights to the city and the bearing this might have on transitional justice in the context of current refugee struggles in the Middle East.