The Fire These Times 131/ Commoning in Lebanon's Palestinian Refugee Camps w/ Yafa El Masri
This is a conversation with Yafa El Masri, a Palestinian refugee researcher who grew up in Burj El Barajneh in Beirut, Lebanon. She's currently finishing her PhD at the University of Padova in Italy.
We primarily spoke about her paper "72 Years of Homemaking in Waiting Zones: Lebanon's “Permanently Temporary” Palestinian Refugee Camps" which she presented at the 2022 Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice summer school in Coimbra, Portugal, where we met.
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We spoke about:
- what it's like to find and build a home in a space that is 'supposed' to be temporary but is not
- Lebanon's most vulnerable people coming together during the Covid pandemic and finding access to care in Palestinian refugee camps
- anti-Palestinian discrimination in Lebanon
- about the impact of Lebanon's broader anti-refugee politics through a (James) Baldwinian understanding of 'the Other'
- about the ongoing crisis in Lebanon
- and more
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Mentions and Book Recommendations:
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Sornit
- Eleven Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exiles edited by Muhammad Ali Khalidi
- The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri
- Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees by Lyndsey Stonebridge
- Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Sornit
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Host: Joey Ayoub
Producer: Joey Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Ibrahim Youssef
Episode design: Joey Ayoub
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