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shelter from the rain. I saw a white modernist building lit up in the dark, tucked away in a far corner of the Giardini. I ran to take cover. It featured an exhibit called Places for People : a sparse but simply furnished demonstration of real interventions rather than idealistic projections, describing three projects that had worked with refugees to make modest but important improvements to their emergency shelters. The ideas were a refreshing change from the rest of the
Introduction Humanitarian efforts to foster digital work for refugees is a rising phenomenon. Ranging from basic digital literacy courses to long-term ICT trainings and tailored support to obtain online consulting work, often through digital work platforms, a range of international and national actors are working in this area (Easton-Calabria and Hackl, in this issue). Alongside humanitarian organisations such as the World Food Programme and
, suggests that the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship programmes has become the new neoliberal mantra also among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and different humanitarian actors ( Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018 ; Turner, 2019 ; Richey and Brockington, 2020 ). Yet, little attention has been devoted to exploring how the discourse of entrepreneurship is mobilised for the presumed benefit of refugee women in the realm of humanitarian governance, here
, 2015 : 399–400), laying shaky ground for how the lives of refugees and internally displaced populations (IDPs) are depicted in gender analysis. Through gender analysis, narratives about refugees and IDPs become institutionalised. Gender analysis narratives in this paper appear primarily in ‘grey’ literature originating from humanitarian actors, including research reports, assessments, baselines, evaluations and technical guidance. In this paper, ‘dominant’ narratives are the
attend NGO classes. In 2016, she joined Queens of Syria , a much acclaimed theatre production performed by refugee women in Amman, for a three-week tour to the UK. On stage, the women recited dialogues that drew parallels between the enslavement of Trojan women in Euripides’ famous tragedy and their personal experiences of loss and displacement in Syria. While Marwa’s husband was initially reluctant to let her act, she managed to convince him by pointing out that her
humanitarian past, there is a brief account of the history of wristbands in refugee management and child nutrition to illustrate how tracking devices have been used for control and governance purposes. Section 4 offers an inventory of proposed aid uses of wearables – the central issue here is not present or future uses but what is imagined as possible, appropriate or useful interventions and – crucially – for whom? Section 5 reflects on how wearables challenge our basic
with individuals from refugee backgrounds. The book addresses the overarching question of how individuals from refugee backgrounds use digital technology to fulfil their communication and information needs. In doing so, Leung describes the scenarios and challenges that refugees face in the three stages that typically describe their journeys: before displacement, during displacement (in transit, refugee camps or detention centres) and resettlement. In her analysis, she rejects the simplistic
outbreak in refugee and displacement settings. COVID-19 has illustrated the risk posed by pandemics in close-confine settings, but decades of analysis and introspection have mainly identified, rather than addressed, the racial and power hierarchies in aid work. If addressing plague requires trust and cooperation, experiences with Ebola response demonstrates that this is in short supply in areas with generational memories of colonial medicine and exploitations. Questions of trust and
approach to innovation in humanitarian action, and other calls have been made specifically to devise principles for ethical humanitarian innovations. The need to make innovation ethical implies that unethical forms exist, which raises the questions of who is to judge and at what point in time ( Elhra, n.d. ; University of Oxford, Refugee Studies Centre, 2015 ). Arguably, innovation in the humanitarian field has always been contested, with over-optimistic assumptions about technological fixes matched by
. (2011) for the case of ‘households’). But problems in collecting quantitative data are not just definitional. Crisp (1999 : 4) highlighted the logistical problems of collecting refugee statistics in the 1990s. Crisp (1999 : 6–8) explains that low resources and insufficient labour meant that counting large populations was operationally extremely challenging. Even in spaces that seem to be prime for bureaucratic processes, such as refugee camps, issues of counting populations are rife