Melissa Gatter | University of Sussex (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Melissa Gatter
Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca, 2023
Based on data collected over 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq and Zaatari refugee cam... more Based on data collected over 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq and Zaatari refugee camps between 2016 and 2018, this chapter examines how the brands of NGOs and Gulf donor states constitute a regime of visibility that sustains corporate humanitarianism and donor politics.
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2021
Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world... more Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world while at the same time containing 40,000 Syrians in a high-security desert environment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq, Jordan, this article understands Azraq’s camp governance as bringing to light a Jordanian care-control politics operated through national aid workers, whose daily actions perpetuate a conflation of humanitarianism and security. This case study analyses Azraq’s politics of time to illuminate that humanitarian language of vulnerability in the camp reflects not only need but also control. National aid workers perceive the newest refugees to the camp (Village 5) to be the most vulnerable and least threatening to the camp’s order, a discursive relationship that has justified mechanisms of control carried out in the name of care. This article argues that local humanitarian assessments of vulnerability in Azraq create a system that preserves vulnerability, which is defined here as a refugee’s dependence on aid to survive, and prevents resilience, or a refugee’s ability to achieve self-sustenance. It confronts humanitarian narratives that drive Jordan’s securitized response by portraying time and refugee-led development as instigating disorder and chaos.
Refugee Review, 2020
Academia, and anthropology in particular, is in need of more open discussion on the ethnographer'... more Academia, and anthropology in particular, is in need of more open discussion on the ethnographer's experience. In this article, I call for a deeper examination of the female research experience that goes beyond identifying gendered challenges. Based on my own fieldwork experiences in Za'tari (2016) and Azraq (2017-18) refugee camps in Jordan, this article explores challenges I faced in fieldwork but more importantly recognizes how these challenges presented opportunities for richer ethnography. I argue that being female granted me access to cultural fluency and a nuanced view of women's lived realities in these spaces. To provide a full picture of my positionality, I reflect on how my role as an aid worker-ethnographer enabled me to shift between both roles to advocate for the women upon whom I depended in the field. This article aims to start a conversation among women researchers about how we can take advantage of our unique positionalities to be responsible researchers both in the field and after.
Forced Migration Review, 2018
Humanitarian efforts to build a model refugee camp when constructing Azraq camp in Jordan – drawi... more Humanitarian efforts to build a model refugee camp when constructing Azraq camp in Jordan – drawing on what was supposed to have been learned in Za’atari camp – missed crucial aspects of Za’atari’s governance.
Contemporary Levant, 2017
By customising childhoods cultivated in child-friendly centres to their individual circumstances,... more By customising childhoods cultivated in child-friendly centres to their individual circumstances, children construct a Syrian identity that is more complex than the apolitical Syrianness encouraged by NGOs and inherently different from one that would have been cultivated in Syria. Against humanitarian discourses of a lost Syrian generation, the author’s material sheds light on a nuanced (rather than lost) generation that is basing its identity on experiences in Za`tari as well as on the idea of return to and reconstruction of Dar`a, its home city.
Book Reviews by Melissa Gatter
Forced Migration Review, 2022
A Review of Mirjam Twigt’s ‘Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’
![Research paper thumbnail of Book review, Camps Revisited [eds Katz, Martin, Minca]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/61664702/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Journal of Refugee Studies, 2019
The diversity of camps studied in the book makes for a foundational text with a generalizable arg... more The diversity of camps studied in the book makes for a foundational text with a generalizable argument that is productive rather than limiting or excluding. Camps Revisited is novel in its comprehensive interrogation of camps and its commitment to exploring such spaces as multidimensional and heterogeneous.
Books by Melissa Gatter
Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official hum... more Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers.
Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca, 2023
Based on data collected over 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq and Zaatari refugee cam... more Based on data collected over 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq and Zaatari refugee camps between 2016 and 2018, this chapter examines how the brands of NGOs and Gulf donor states constitute a regime of visibility that sustains corporate humanitarianism and donor politics.
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2021
Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world... more Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world while at the same time containing 40,000 Syrians in a high-security desert environment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq, Jordan, this article understands Azraq’s camp governance as bringing to light a Jordanian care-control politics operated through national aid workers, whose daily actions perpetuate a conflation of humanitarianism and security. This case study analyses Azraq’s politics of time to illuminate that humanitarian language of vulnerability in the camp reflects not only need but also control. National aid workers perceive the newest refugees to the camp (Village 5) to be the most vulnerable and least threatening to the camp’s order, a discursive relationship that has justified mechanisms of control carried out in the name of care. This article argues that local humanitarian assessments of vulnerability in Azraq create a system that preserves vulnerability, which is defined here as a refugee’s dependence on aid to survive, and prevents resilience, or a refugee’s ability to achieve self-sustenance. It confronts humanitarian narratives that drive Jordan’s securitized response by portraying time and refugee-led development as instigating disorder and chaos.
Refugee Review, 2020
Academia, and anthropology in particular, is in need of more open discussion on the ethnographer'... more Academia, and anthropology in particular, is in need of more open discussion on the ethnographer's experience. In this article, I call for a deeper examination of the female research experience that goes beyond identifying gendered challenges. Based on my own fieldwork experiences in Za'tari (2016) and Azraq (2017-18) refugee camps in Jordan, this article explores challenges I faced in fieldwork but more importantly recognizes how these challenges presented opportunities for richer ethnography. I argue that being female granted me access to cultural fluency and a nuanced view of women's lived realities in these spaces. To provide a full picture of my positionality, I reflect on how my role as an aid worker-ethnographer enabled me to shift between both roles to advocate for the women upon whom I depended in the field. This article aims to start a conversation among women researchers about how we can take advantage of our unique positionalities to be responsible researchers both in the field and after.
Forced Migration Review, 2018
Humanitarian efforts to build a model refugee camp when constructing Azraq camp in Jordan – drawi... more Humanitarian efforts to build a model refugee camp when constructing Azraq camp in Jordan – drawing on what was supposed to have been learned in Za’atari camp – missed crucial aspects of Za’atari’s governance.
Contemporary Levant, 2017
By customising childhoods cultivated in child-friendly centres to their individual circumstances,... more By customising childhoods cultivated in child-friendly centres to their individual circumstances, children construct a Syrian identity that is more complex than the apolitical Syrianness encouraged by NGOs and inherently different from one that would have been cultivated in Syria. Against humanitarian discourses of a lost Syrian generation, the author’s material sheds light on a nuanced (rather than lost) generation that is basing its identity on experiences in Za`tari as well as on the idea of return to and reconstruction of Dar`a, its home city.
Forced Migration Review, 2022
A Review of Mirjam Twigt’s ‘Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan’
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2019
The diversity of camps studied in the book makes for a foundational text with a generalizable arg... more The diversity of camps studied in the book makes for a foundational text with a generalizable argument that is productive rather than limiting or excluding. Camps Revisited is novel in its comprehensive interrogation of camps and its commitment to exploring such spaces as multidimensional and heterogeneous.
Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official hum... more Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers.