On the borders: Research with refugees of conflict
Alfadhli, Khalifah H. . 2020
This chapter overviews an eight-months long ethnography with Syrian refugees in an urban setting near the northern borders of Jordan. The aim was to explore how crossing borders is not just a process of moving from risk to safety, but changes how people see themselves and others. Specifically, the aim was to capture features of the refugees' community formation in exile, where the previous borders between social groups start to diminish and new borders arise to bring together those who struggle together. Through this chapter, the first author will discuss his own experiences as a person from the Middle East, with previous experience with armed conflict, but still struggling to navigate fieldwork in ways that might be unexpected to foreigners to the region. The ethnography took place from September 2015 to May 2016 in Irbid city by the borders, in a neighborhood known as "Dara'a", named after the Syrian region that the refugee residents come from, which hosts more than 130,000 Syrian refugees. The first author had the chance to embed himself in the neighborhood by volunteering to teach in a school and lived next to this neighborhood. This overview of the fieldwork experience will include a discussion of preparations and logic of decisions to choose the location, getting access, description of the atmosphere of the setting and the embedding process, the data collection process, and finally, lessons learned from the experience.
This chapter overviews an eight-months long ethnography with Syrian refugees in an urban setting near the northern borders of Jordan. The aim was to explore how crossing borders is not just a…
This chapter builds on previous chapters, on crowds (Chapter 15) and emergencies and disasters (Chapter 16), to show the relationship between the two. It describes a programme of research that has…