2022-23 Voices in Middle East Studies: Featuring Groundbreaking Scholarship in the Field of Middle East Studies
The Middle East Center presents “Feeding People is not Enough:” Local Humanitarianism in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Jordan on November 14, 2022, a talk by Gozde Burcu Ege (Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Washington).
In 2016, the UNHCR reported that the average time a refugee will spend in a refugee camp is 17 years. Although refugees are typically treated in terms of emergency and crises, these data underscore the fact that many refugees spend much, if not most, of their lives outside of their homelands, living in a state of permanent temporariness. Perhaps no other refugee community better represents the problem of protracted exile than the Palestinians. In this talk, I present the insights I gained from my field research with youth volunteers in the Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan and aim to demonstrate the unique approaches Palestinian youth developed to respond the needs of their fellow camp inhabitants.
Gozde Burcu Ege is a Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. Her research interests include refugee studies, humanitarianism, and youth in the Middle East. She is currently writing her dissertation for which she conducted two and a half years of ethnographic research in Amman, Jordan. Utilizing mixed qualitative methods in multiple Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, her dissertation investigates how Palestinian refugee-citizen youth who have long been conceived as recipients of humanitarian aid are themselves practicing voluntary humanitarianism in a context of ordinary precarity, receding international aid and new waves of refugees in Jordan. Burcu was the pre-doctoral fellow of Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Humanitarianisms during 2020-2021.
Sponsored by the Middle East Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Contact: mecuw@uw.edu.