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Abstract: Narratives surrounding public health infrastructure in refugee camps are critical to understanding the lived experiences of camp residents but are often understudied. This project draws on James Scott’s conceptions of the ways in which urban planning and governance strategies in the imperial era were used to render communities ‘legible’ to their foreign governments, arguing that the ways humanitarian organizations in these camps create and maintain infrastructure is tied to a similar conception of ‘camp legibility.’ It argues the legibility of a refugee camp is a product of its physical and administrative order, its temporariness, and the maintenance of international narratives of refugee passivity. This theoretical framework is formed and discussed through the lens of wastewater infrastructure in Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, which remains the largest Syrian refugee camp in the Middle East. Through first person accounts from residents and aid workers on the ground, it traces the history of these systems from 2012, when the camp opened and camp governance implemented temporary washblocks that put many camp residents in danger, to 2019, with the completion of one of the largest development projects ever to have taken place in a UNHCR refugee camp. Through these narratives it becomes clear that while the humanitarian apparatus’ primary concern was maintaining the legibility of the camp, both in Jordan and in the international sphere, camp residents were primarily concerned with its livability over the course of the many years that they would be there, or how bearable an environment it was for them to be in long-term. This tension eventually led residents to construct household toilets when aid organizations pushed back and refused to concede to the necessity for systems that were not public. In the end, these makeshift toilets created a public health crisis for which the solution was a 51-million-euro wastewater network, and in an effort to maintain camp legibility, the public reasoning for this system became sustainability and cost effectiveness. This crisis points to the critical consequences of such a disconnect between humanitarian and residential priorities but its response sheds light on the possibility of rebalancing this tension between legibility and livability through residential activism and the importance of reframing refugee narratives around the work these individuals do to make their lives more bearable each day.
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Type of Resource: text
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Note: thesis: Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2020
Note (displayLabel="Concentration"): Middle East Studies
Genre (aat): theses
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Access Condition: restriction on access: All rights reserved. Collection is open for research.
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/ea57-z721