Al Wehdat Camp, like all Palestinian refugee camps, was built in response to Al Nakba, as a space of temporary refuge to generations of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their homes. In this research, I conceptualized home as a multi-scalar territory that exists in different places, in different time intervals, all at once, through a spatio-temporal simultaneity that produces Al Wehdat Camp as a transient territory, that exists here and there, now and then, at home and in exile. Through the different chapters of this dissertation, I studied those different scales of home, the home-land, the home-city, the home-camp and the home-home, through an interdisciplinary research approach and framework that were built around three pillars: the body, movement, and territory. In my research, I studied a number of paths of displacement that the Palestinian refugees have traveled across during their uprooting from Palestine, mapping their movement to get to Al Wehdat Camp. Through that tracing of the different paths, I was able to conceptualize the camp as a point that exists at the intersection of a number of paths that have led the Palestinian refugees to the camp and also allowed them to move past it to different locations within the city. That continuous movement of displaced bodies from Palestine to Jordan have allowed the Palestinian refugees to transgress the colonial borders that has disconnected them from the space of the home-land, and allowed them to reproduce the space of Palestine in Al Wehdat Camp.
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Coming as a collection of observations from the field, I used this article to reflect on 9 months of fieldwork in Al Wehdat camp in Amman, Jordan. Using feminist research methodologies that make transparent the process of knowledge production, primarily ethnographic field visits and focus group discussions, I relied on the bodies of the camp inhabitants as sites of knowledge to learn more about life in the camp, with all what their embodied knowledge encompasses of ambiguity and the messiness of everyday life, aiming to challenge some of the power structures that otherwise control the process of knowledge production about and in the camp. I also brought myself into the frame of inquiry and used my own body as a tool of investigation, reflecting on my own position as a female researcher that is both an outsider and an insider to the camp context. ... Read more

In Al Wehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, women are usually seen in motion, attempting to navigate the camp space or move around it to complete their everyday errands within what is a highly male-dominated space. The spaces in which they stop, and stay, are limited. For this paper, I conduct an architectural investigation into the camp to understand the different ways architecture has contributed to the gendering of the public spaces in the camp, particularly in relation to two elements: streets and walls. Streets are fundamentally paths of activity and movement, paths along which women are usually seen moving, while walls are what construct interiors inside which activities take place, ones that women either visit or avoid, with both elements drawing lines of privacy, ownership, and safety. This investigation makes use of nine months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Al Wehdat Camp between 2019 and 2023, based on focus groups and interviews with women in the camp. I rely on the experience of the women to better understand the gendering of the camp space as a way of understanding the spatial production and transformation of the camp after six decades of its establishment. I also reflect on my own experience of researching the camp during the fieldwork, as a woman Palestinian and Jordanian scholar who stands at the threshold between being an insider and an outsider to the experiences of the women and the lived reality of Al Wehdat Camp. ... Read more