Transformations through disaster : living and working in refugee spaces.

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of refugee spaces in Greece and Lebanon. It explores the ways in which disaster transforms people. It is a sustained reflection on my own experience as a volunteer aid worker and on the experience of refugees that I worked and lived with. This study uses the concept of enunciatory communities to study the ways people live in a double bind as refugees, aid workers, victims of war-trauma and humans who demand dignity. The fieldwork has permitted me to observe the ways in which disaster brings different kinds of experts to the same site, the ways the boundaries between aid worker, volunteer and refugee are fluid. Furthermore, the thesis shows the way disaster brought issues of aid and law to the everyday lives of refugees and the ways in which care for their communities- through aid assistance, teaching and singing- has become essential to refugee identities and lives.