Feeling the refugee camp

Affectual research, bodies, and suspicion

Bibliographic Data

ID8067390
AuthorsHanno Brankamp (0000-0001-6146-9660, Department of Geography King's College London London UK, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume54
Issue3
Pages383-391
Publication date2021-05-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArea (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0004-0894 • E-ISSN: 1475-4762
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/area.12739
OpenAlexW3168347829
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited59

This paper advances debates in camp geographies and forced migration studies by centring the methodological import of emotions and affect in research on refugee camps. Camps are often spatial expressions of compassion, fear, care, suspicion, but also incubate hope, solidarity, and feelings of belonging among encamped communities. Researchers are never insulated from these complex emotions and affects. While qualitative, ethnographic, experiential, or otherwise sensory methods continue to be widely used in this field of study, the emotional entanglements that arise from the embodied encounters between researchers, residents, and camp spaces are not yet well understood. The paper argues that it is methodologically pertinent to not simply incorporate such affectual intensities into existing readings of the camp as an exceptional space, but to understand people's differentially experienced feelings as actively shaping the camp's geography. It illustrates this argument by engaging with feelings of suspicion that pervaded my long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Ultimately, the paper urges scholars to explore camps beyond their known capacities for controlling mobility and motion as spaces that are also imbued with feelings and sensibilities

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Argument (complex analysis · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Feeling · Heterotopia (medicine · Political science · Refugee · Sociology · Solidarity · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medicine · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Gender Studies · Law · Social Psychology