Technologies of life-making in the British refugee camps of the Southern Levant
2025-07-01
This article offers new conceptual and empirical clarity for the study of technology in refugee camps. By approaching the refugee camp as a contested spatial-cultural field, the article interrogates technology not simply as a means of aid and biopolitical control, but also of life-making. Framing refugees’ innovative practices in states of emergency as a ‘technology of life-making’ challenges the imperialism of encampment, which served to repress such technologies. Through extensive archival research, both “along” and “against” the grain of statecraft histories, the article explores the experiences of post-WWII European imperial refugees in the Southern Levant, particularly Greek and Yugoslav refugees emplaced in British camps in Gaza and Sinai, respectively. A comparison between Nuseirat’s Greek camp and El Shatt’s Yugoslav camp problematizes reductionist conceptions of camps exclusively as sites of technologization, domination and aesthetic scientific universalism, illuminating an obscured form of technology on the spectrum between care and resistance.