Camps
Simon Turner
(University of Kopenhagen)
Globally, the (large-scale) accommodation of millions of refugees has become a major challenge. This panel will focus on empirically grounded and comparative studies of the material and temporal dimensions that characterize the different forms, conceptualizations, and practices of accommodating refugees.
Refugee camps are a means of protection deployed in situations of emergency to provide physical, food and health security to fugitives and displaced people. As such, they are considered to be transient settlements, where the figure of the refugee is constructed as the ‘constitutive other’, neither belonging here nor there. In practice, however, this temporariness may become quasi-permanent – a permanent exception (Agamben) – not only for individual refugees but because camps may continue to exist for years or even decades. Camps produce paradoxical, ambivalent situations and settings: spatially and materially, camps have boundaries, physical barriers, and other forms of material and social forms of containment that separate populations and create a distinction between ‘insiders’ (camp residents) and ‘outsiders’ (locals). In everyday practices, however, the limits and boundaries are permeable, allowing people, goods, things, and ideas to cross.
- Keynote
Simon Turner
(University of Kopenhagen) - Discussant
Simona Pagano
(Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences) - Convenor / Chair
Andrea Lauser
(University of Göttingen) - Contributors
Sarah Mallet and Luise Fowler
Carna Brkovic
Elsa Mescoli
Yaatsil Guevara Gonzalez
Speaker
Simon Turner
(University of Copenhagen)
Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) at the University of Copenhagen. His research has amongst other things focused on humanitarian governance and everyday life in refugee camps.
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