Researching Palestinian refugees: Who sets the agenda?
APRIL 29, 2017 9:30 P.M. (UPDATED: APRIL 29, 2017 9:30 P.M.)
A man sits outside a demolished building in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital Damascus on April 6, 2015. (AFP/File)
This commentary was authored by Al-Shabaka Policy Member Anaheed Al-Hardan, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut and an advisory board member of the Palestinian Oral History Archive. Her research on right of return movement activism, critical research methods in Palestine studies and Palestinian intellectual history has appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016).
Overview
Only a handful of research articles on Palestinian refugees in Syria could be found until a few years ago. After the uprooting of a significant part of the community following the bombardment and siege of Yarmouk Camp at the end of 2012, research and publications proliferated. Completed and in-process dissertations, scholarly articles, and research projects on the community are now numerous, especially in English. This sudden flood of research on and interest in Palestinians from Syria has not been limited to academia, but has also taken root in journalism and the policy world.
This transformation in research interest is due to a rising concern about the plight of these Palestinians, and to researchers having better access to the community in the refugee camps and cities of Syria’s neighboring states, as well as in Europe. There are also underlying reasons that have driven the shift. These relate to structures of knowledge production in both material and epistemological, or theoretical, terms. These structures are material in that research is carried out on the ground and is part of a larger industry of global knowledge production. They are theoretical in that certain ideas drive this industry and its research methods.
The ways in which these two facets of structures of knowledge production drive research can be seen in studies that have already been carried out. For example, camp-based Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were the primary choice for research when it came to Palestinian refugees before their current eclipse by those from Syria. Indeed, since the 1990s, a massive number of academic monographs and articles on Palestinians in Lebanon were accompanied by an almost complete absence of those on the community in neighboring Syria.
This can be explained by the fact that Syria was never as open or accessible to researchers as was Lebanon. Moreover, Palestinians in Syria constituted a relatively better-off community in terms of their integration, socioeconomic status, and overall living conditions, in contrast to those in Lebanon, who have been denied basic rights, such as the right to work and to own property. As a result, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, particularly those in the camps, provided and continue to provide a fertile ground for a politics of “researching down.” Palestinians from Syria now join them in this status.
Researching down, rather than up or horizontally, is characteristic of the social sciences. Researchers usually justify this preference as a way to “give voice to the voiceless.” Assuming that such communities are in need of spokespersons has its own set of problems. These claims also obscure the fact that accessing poor and deprived communities is easier than accessing, for example, assimilated Palestinians who are Lebanese citizens or middle class Palestinian professionals outside of Lebanon’s camps. These research trends can skew knowledge in that after reading this literature, one could be left with the impression that no Palestinian refugee community exists outside of the camps.
This commentary examines the material and epistemological structures of knowledge production that make circumstances ripe for the exploitation of researched communities -- in this case, Palestinian refugees. It also considers the type of theory of knowledge and university that makes this system possible. It concludes by examining the challenges that lie ahead for Palestinian communities on the receiving end of this research, as well as for researchers and allies. Its aim is to initiate a conversation on how to confront these challenges -- an urgent task given the lack of a coherent and representative Palestinian political anti-colonial liberation project, as well as institutions or structures that such a movement could potentially mobilize to confront the repercussions of exploitative research practices.
A Global Colonial Division of Academic Labor
The politics of researching down is premised on inherently unequal power relations, which can lead to “misery tourism.” In this phenomenon, some visitors will travel to certain popular and accessible economically deprived sites for research and to write articles, and some will come in search of an adventure or just to look. A resident of Shatila Camp, a popular research destination in Beirut, described misery tourism to a researcher. He said that outsiders who visit the camp walk around for a while, take some pictures and, yes, some even cry about the desolation, but then they leave again and everything is as before. In his view, the camps have become like “zoos” and the refugees like “animals to stare at.” Some come for research and to write articles, but, he asked, have all these writings ever changed anything about the situation, have they brought help or at least some money into the camps? As researchers come to visit over and over again, the inner wounds of people are constantly reopened.
Originally published on Al-Shabaka's website on April 27, 2017.
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