Many excellent studies have been published over the decades examining the impact of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Palestinians’ lives, in the refugee camps, on relief efforts, with human development, in camp structures, and on politics with host countries, among other topics. Legal analyses have focused on the structure of UNWRA within the international refugee regime that developed in the years following World War II, as the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) came just a few years after Europe and the newly created United Nations were grappling with the massive demands posed by displaced persons around the world resulting from the war, decolonization, and regional conflicts. Absent from the scholarly record is a history of the legal relationship between UNRWA and the Jordanian government, which, in part, my project at the American Center of Research will begin to rectify by focusing on the following questions: How did legal and administrative agreements between the Jordanian government and UNRWA affect Palestinian citizen-refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in Jordan? What did the changing Jordanian legal landscape in the early 1950s mean for the country enforcing its national laws for Jordanian citizens, which at times included a party (UNRWA) to legislation that held diplomatic immunity in Jordan? How did the international context in which Jordan was not yet a member state of the United Nations affect Jordan’s enforcement of national law in court cases that involved UNRWA and its officials, who sometimes were also Palestinian citizen-refugees of Jordan?^[1]

As a ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow in summer 2023, I primarily searched in UNRWA’s Amman-based archives, particularly the central registry, for historical documentation during the 1948–1967 period, when Jordan ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While this period remains understudied in Jordan’s history, this project is a natural continuation of my earlier research: 1) in 1997–1998 I focused on Jordanian Jerusalem during this time in my doctoral dissertation (Katz 2005); and 2) while my second book, a critical edition of a World War II-era Palestinian diary, focused on the writing by a young man from Hebron during the British Mandate period, my current project extends the analysis of Hebron and its surrounding villages and refugee camps during the early 1950s, following the end of the British Mandate and the division of Palestine between the newly established Israel and the expanded Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. 

My efforts turned up documentation elucidating the administrative and legal relationship between the Jordanian government and UNRWA in correspondence between the sides, along with staff memos, reports, drafts of reports, legal documents, meeting notes, and other related materials. The central registry in UNRWA’s archives “contains records related to various legal and administrative matters pertaining to programs, agreements with governments and international organizations, and information about UNRWA personnel” (Tamari and Zureik 2001). The documents found during weeks of searching in the central registry will enhance my historical analysis of the legal relationship between UNRWA and the Jordanian government and the Jordanian legal system in the early years of the Palestinian refugee crisis and UNRWA’s existence. Having already discovered Jordanian arrest records from the Hebron District for the limited 1951–1953 period, which serve as a critical primary source, the project also focuses on Palestinians’ lived experiences in the Hebron District, under the legal and administrative frameworks established by Jordan and UNRWA after the 1948 war, both as refugees and as Jordanian citizens. The additional resources I found in UNRWA’s archive will undoubtedly expand my analysis of the legal circumstances of Palestinian citizen-refugees in Jordan from 1948–1967. 

My writing thus far has clarified how Jordan’s government enacted new laws for the post-1948 period in the unified kingdom (1950) and enforced laws on citizens, including Palestinian refugee-citizens, laws that also affected UNRWA, an extra-territorial international institution. Gathering historical sources for Jordan during the 1948–1967 period remains challenging, leaving this time in Jordan’s history and the history of Palestinian refugee-citizens in Jordan understudied. By turning to a broad range of historical sources, such as those available in UNRWA’s archives, historians can continue to expand historical knowledge during the early, challenging years in Jordan following its independence, while analyzing the aftermath of the seismic event of the Palestinian Nakba and the relationship that UNRWA had with the Jordanian government as the primary aid organization for Palestinian refugees.   

The UNRWA documentation will help clarify how UNRWA and Jordan dealt with legal issues from 1951 to1953. Much of the documentation in the central registry traces the nature of immunity and privileges for UNRWA employees (effectively international staff) included in the 1951 Jordan-UNRWA agreement, but it draws on the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. The issue of ration cards is also quite well documented in the UNRWA archives, mainly regarding the rolls of who had the right to a ration card and who did not. The precarious circumstances for Palestinian refugees during the post-1948 years led ration cards to become the source of criminal activity, and the crime registers include several cases of theft, forgery, and selling of stolen ration cards. In addition to the crime registers, the UNRWA archives include several cases, both criminal and civil, that are unusually well documented and stretch across the 1950s. Such cases can only add to our understanding of the intersection of legal issues between Jordan and UNRWA. 

References

Katz, Kimberly. 2005. Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Tamari, Salim and Elia Zureik. 2001. “UNRWA Archives on Palestinian Refugees.” In Reinterpreting the Historical Record: The Uses of Palestinian Refugee Archives for Social Science Research and Policy Analysis, edited by Salim Tamari and Elia Zureik, 25–60. Jerusalem: Institute for Jerusalem Studies.

^[1] Jordan was admitted to the United Nations on December 14, 1955.

Kimberly Katz is professor of Middle East history and coordinator of the Human Rights & History minor at Towson University in Maryland, focusing her research and teaching interests on social, cultural, colonial, and post-colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has conducted research in Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Egypt with the support of various fellowships, including from the Fulbright Program, Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), and the American Center of Research (ACOR). Her first book, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces, was published in 2005 by the University Press of Florida. Her second book, A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941–1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2009 and in Arabic by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing (AIRP) in 2017.

The post Between Jordanian and International Law: UNRWA Involvement in Jordanian Court Cases, 1948–1967 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

What can ethnography contribute to our understandings of health and disability in Jordan and elsewhere? In this roundtable event, Morgen Chalmiers (University of California San Diego), Timothy Loh (MIT), and I offered provisional responses by drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and the United States while reflecting on broader research trends in the Middle East and North Africa region. Here, I (Christine Sargent, University of Colorado Denver) write primarily in the first person to recap our event and provide additional reflections.

Frameworks and landscapes

Carole McGranahan (2018, 2) describes “an ethnographic sensibility” as:

“a culturally-grounded way of both being in and seeing the world… It is all that goes without saying in terms of what is considered normative or natural, and yet it is also the very rules and proclaimed truths — about the way things are, and the way they should be — that underlie both everyday and ritual beliefs and practices.”

Building on this generative description, I’d like to suggest that ethnography can offer three significant contributions to studies on health and disability. First and foremost, ethnographic approaches work from the ground up. This means ethnography can center the perspectives and projects of diverse communities as they attempt to survive and thrive in unequal conditions of prosperity and precarity​. Second, ethnographers understand biomedicine, global health, and rehabilitative therapies as politically and historically particular institutions rather than universal truths. An ethnographic orientation focuses on the actors, practices, and technologies that enable powerful institutions to function, revealing their tangible but often surprisingly fragile day-day-day operations. It also allows us to trace how these institutions rely on and reproduce — but are not reducible to — (post)colonial relations of value and labor. Finally, ethnography embraces the messiness and multiplicity of lived experience, attending to the macro- and microstructures of power that shape how people to make their way through the world and the world makes its way through them. While biomedicine and biomedically adjacent fields are increasingly hegemonic, they remain entangled in other frameworks for understanding and feeling fundamentally human experiences of health and illness.

From the outset of our event, the timeliness of the topic weighed heavily on speakers and audience members alike. We began by mourning and honoring longtime ACOR staff member Cesar Octavo, who had succumbed to COVID-19 just days earlier, on March 15. His passing occurred during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave in Jordan, as the country grappled with then-rising infection and mortality rates. Three months later, we continue to live through the uneven ebbs and flows of a global pandemic whose impacts underscore how biological, environmental, material, social, cultural, and political dimensions of health and illness are fundamentally interconnected. Only by thinking about these categories together and recognizing how each is deeply embedded in the others can we begin to imagine effective, ethical responses to the world being remade in the pandemic’s wake. Globally and locally, exposure and vulnerability to COVID-19 reflect pre-existing racialized and classed inequities, and these familiar patterns remind us “how certain social and cultural norms around health disparities, values about differences between certain bodies and social groups, and health and welfare structures were in existence long before COVID-19” (Sangaramoorthy 2020).

ACOR’s speaker series and fellowships offer platforms for generating collaboration and criticism — across disciplines, institutions, and continents. As enduring colonial inequities shape contemporary (research) worlds, the production of knowledge and distribution of its benefits do not occur randomly or equally. All three panelists acknowledged the institutional, financial, and geographic mobilities afforded by U.S. institutional affiliations. Additionally, our positionalities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, disability) shape our everyday interactions as early-career researchers conducting fieldwork in Jordan, and they locate us in broader structures of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and “North-South” geopolitics. Attuned to these inequities, we are eager to cultivate models to build better research, where “better” means research driven by local agendas and priorities and grounded in materially transparent partnerships and exchange, rather than extraction.

Inspired by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and collectives such as the Cite Black Women movement, I began by mapping the citational landscape that has converged around questions of health in Jordan, along with more nascent research on disability. Citations, Ahmed reminds us, work as “screening techniques,” shaping the creation of knowledge that comes to build disciplinary “canons” through inclusion and exclusion. And as Seteney Shami pointed out in her recent (May 2021) ACOR presentation, the gaps between research conducted on Jordan and research conducted in Jordan remain troubling (and index deeper questions about research for whom and by whom). Indicative of Jordan’s highly developed healthcare system and geopolitical location, research outputs dealing with health are robust; those concerning disability remain emergent. While ethnography and ethnographic methods remain less commonly cited among qualitative researchers, an array of methodological companions, such as “critical phenomenology” and “interpretive phenomenology,” appear increasingly popular (Bawadi and Al-Hamdan 2017; Obeidat and Lally 2014; Nabolsi and Carson 2011; Nazzal and AL-Rawajfah 2018). Ethnography’s muted presence in an otherwise dynamic qualitative landscape invites further opportunities for discussion and collaboration. Beyond conventional academic publications, however, multimedia, open-access, and bilingual outlets including Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research, Eib (part of the Sowt podcast platform), and 7iber bring ethnographic commitments and methods to their explorations of health and disability. These platforms mobilize ethnography’s most transgressive and generative qualities, centering the expertise of local knowledge makers while refusing to be limited by academic paywalls.

Building from fieldwork

We began our individual presentations with doctoral candidate Morgen Chalmiers, a feminist ethnographer and physician in training who has been conducting multi-sited fieldwork on Syrian refugee women’s reproductive experiences in San Diego and Amman. In her work, Chalmiers brings together the paradigms of reproductive justice and critical refugee studies. As articulated by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice centers the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Key for Chalmiers’s work is putting this framework in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective defines the latter as “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” Accompanying Syrian refugees seeking reproductive healthcare, Chalmiers is studying clinical interactions — in the U.S. and Jordan — “as sites where macrosocial structures of power, privilege, and inequity are manifest, challenged, and negotiated through everyday interactions.”

Next, I offered an overview of my research on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in greater Amman. Anthropology recognizes disability as a form of human diversity present across time and space. Ethnographic methods allow us to explore how people make sense of normative and non-normative bodyminds (Price 2015, Schalk 2018) while attending to the historical and material conditions that inform these processes. Jordan is home to dynamic and engaged disability activist and ally communities. It also boasts some of the most progressive laws in the region and was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Materializing the cultural, political, economic, and infrastructural transformations required to build an accessible and inclusive Jordan, however, remain an ongoing struggle. My fieldwork took place during a period of significant legislative development (2013–2015), but many families struggled with the gaps between progressive policy and practical implementation. I spoke with activists, advocates, educators, therapists, kin, and neighbors about the complexities of disability stigma, which continues to shape the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, I documented diverse strategies that family- and community-based organizations have developed to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about what Down syndrome is and what living with Down syndrome entails. These strategies weave together different resources, including transnational Down syndrome advocacy networks, human- and disability-rights vocabularies, Islamic and Christian visions of humanity, and biomedical or biogenetic models of heredity. Ultimately, I argue that centering disability as an analytic and dimension of lived experience can illuminate broader dynamics of change and struggle in Jordan today.

Finally, doctoral candidate Timothy Loh connected theoretical frameworks on language in medicine and disability to his dissertation research examining deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have recently emerged in the country, including the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that provides its users with some electronic access to sound. Taking an anthropological approach to language, which emphasizes the multifunctionality of language rather than merely its capacity to describe things in the world, Loh’s research builds on recent conversations between medical and linguistic anthropologists about how language is constituted in medicine and vice versa. Loh asks how language ideologies influence the ways that medical professionals provide biomedical interventions for deaf children and how deaf people and their families engage with these technologies. The question of which technologies deaf people should use is bound up in the question of which language and languages they should learn (Friedner and Kusters 2020). In fact, Loh argued that this question takes on salience in the Middle East, a site of intense language ideologies where both scholars and the public actively debate the relationships between modern standard Arabic and colloquial dialects, indigenous languages such as Tamazight, colonial languages including French and Spanish, and English as a global language. The fact that Arabic is the both the language of the Quran as well as of the nation-state in Jordan, Loh pointed out, has implications for what languages deaf Jordanians are expected to know and to learn. 

Collectively, our research and data (re)emphasize the centrality of caregiving and care-seeking practices to projects of health and wellbeing in Jordan. We have lived through different stages of the pandemic across our different countries of residence, research, and the places we call home, raising new questions about anthropology, fieldwork, and what ethnography has to offer. We hope that our panel (and this summary) invite further discussion and new relationships that further ethnographic approaches to health and disability in Jordan and beyond.

Citations and Resources

Bawadi, H.A., and Z. Al-Hamdan. 2017. “The Cultural Beliefs of Jordanian Women during Childbearing: Implications for Nursing Care.” International Nursing Review 64 (2): 187–194.

Cite Black Women Collective.

Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Eib. Sowt Podcasts.

Friedner, Michele and Anneliese Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:31–46.

Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research.

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15 (1): 1–10.

Moghnieh, Lamia, Mustafa Abdalla, Suhad Daher-Nashaf, Abdelhadi Elhalhouli. 2021.
 العيش والموت في زمن الكورونا: مقاربات من الأنثروبولوجيا الطبيّة في مجتمعات المنطقة العربيّة. Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Nabolsi, Manar M., and Alexander M. Carson. 2011. “Spirituality, Illness and Personal Responsibility: The Experience of Jordanian Muslim Men with Coronary Artery Disease.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 25 (4): 716–724.

Nazzal, Mohammad S., and Omar M. AL-Rawajfah. 2018. “Lived Experiences of Jordanian Mothers Caring for a Child with Disability.” Disability and Rehabilitation 40 (23): 2723–2733.

Obeidat, Rana F., and Robin M. Lally. 2014. “Health-Related Information Exchange Experiences of Jordanian Women at Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Journal of Cancer Education 29 (3): 548–554.

Price, Margaret. 2015. ” The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284.

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2020. “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement.” Somatosphere, 1 May 2020.

Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network. “What is Reproductive Justice?”

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”

The post Wellbeing and Living Well: Ethnographic Approaches to Health and Disability appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Morgen, can you tell us a little more about yourself and what brings you to Jordan?

I’m a student in the joint MD/PhD program at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in medical anthropology. My larger dissertation project examines systems of reproductive healthcare provision for displaced populations and considers how experiences of forced migration influence reproductive subjectivity and decision-making. My research in Jordan builds upon prior work with the Syrian refugee community in San Diego while also focusing on communicative processes and interactions facilitated by and within the humanitarian healthcare sector.

More generally, my ethnographic fieldwork and clinical practice are informed by the paradigm of reproductive justice and a commitment to addressing health disparities through an intersectional feminist framework. I’m especially passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. After completing my PhD and MD, I plan to pursue a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and seek a joint appointment at a research university as a practicing physician and professor in the social sciences.

What is one thing someone might not know about your area of study?

The birth of anthropology as a discipline was deeply linked to Euro-American colonialism and imperial rule, a history that has shaped both our methodological approaches and some of the most foundational assumptions of our scholarship—even basic questions like who or what is appropriate for an anthropologist to study. Over the last several decades, feminist ethnographers have sought to radically transform and decolonize anthropology by integrating insights and methods developed by critical theorists in their study of race, gender, and social structures. It’s a very exciting time to be a student and witness these innovative efforts to reinvent the discipline.

Do you have a favorite cultural place in Jordan? If so, what is special about it?

When traveling, there’s a tendency to seek out “authentic” cultural experiences, whether this means consuming “exotic” foods or watching a “traditional” dance performance. However, my graduate work in anthropology and critical gender studies has emphasized that “culture” encompasses much more than symbols, practices, and performances—it’s equally present (and reproduced) within everyday interactions. So I think my favorite cultural activity would be chatting and sharing a meal with friends at one of our favorite restaurants (Khal is always a popular choice).

Morgen A. Chalmiers is a Ph.D. candidate in psychological and medical anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and an M.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellowship 2020–2021. Her anthropological research broadly examines women’s experiences of reproductive healthcare using the tools and theoretical lens of psychological anthropology. She works with a collaborative team across the UC campuses to conduct community-engaged, multi-sited research on resettled refugee women’s access to reproductive healthcare. She is passionate about integrating anthropological insights into clinical practice and health policy through interdisciplinary collaboration. To read more about her work and publications, visit morgenchalmiers.com.

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The post Ask A Scholar: Morgen Chalmiers, Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Fall 2020 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Jordanian aid workers were indispensable to the humanitarian response as hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Jordan after the start of the Syrian conflict. Unlike many members of the international humanitarian staff, Jordanian aid workers could communicate directly with refugees. They shared cultural and religious norms with Syrians and, most importantly, spoke the same language. Interactions between Jordanian aid workers and Syrian refugees reflect the daily experiences of displacement and refuge. Still, predominant narratives about the Syrian refugee crisis neglect quotidian life, and instead, focus on the scale and scope of displacement. The study of Jordanian aid workers has fallen outside the scope of scholarly or journalistic analyses (for an exception, see former ACOR-CAORC fellow Patricia Ward’s forthcoming dissertation).

In this essay, I describe the experiences of one Jordanian aid worker named Galya. Galya was drawn to humanitarian work because she saw an opportunity to do something good in the world. Humanitarian work seemed exciting and important to her, even patriotic and Islamic. But with an unemployment rate around 40% among Jordanian youth, any job with the opportunity for advancement would have been appealing. Like many Jordanian women who have entered the humanitarian workforce, Galya has experienced new physical and emotional demands. Aid work has become a space in which she negotiates gender norms and confronts gendered expectations.

Dressing the Part

I met Galya in 2014 at a Starbucks on the affluent side of Amman. We didn’t order anything, but instead, sat in the dimly lit coffee shop talking about refugee aid. Galya has long dark hair that she often swept off her shoulders into a high messy bun. She wears little makeup, save for her signature black eyeliner, which is thick and winged at the edges. At the time, Galya had just started a new job in Za’atari refugee camp. She worked to connect Syrian refugees with social workers, health care providers, and protection officers. Her gregarious demeanor and ability to trouble-shoot made her a natural for the job.

Galya and I spent a lot of time together over the past four years. When I began to visit refugee camps with her, she gave me advice on how to dress. “See how my shirt covers my butt?” she asked me. Galya always wore jeans and long, baggy shirts with sleeves to her elbows despite the oppressive summer heat. Clothing served a dual purpose for Galya: it protected her from unwelcomed stares in the camps and was her way of showing respect to a conservative community.

Despite the cultural and religious similarities among Syrians and Jordanians – those that were especially stark compared to members of the international staff – there were also some notable differences. When I asked Galya why she always wore her hair up, she explained that one day a little boy in Za’atari followed her around the camp with a pair of scissors. Someone instructed him to cut off Galya’s long hair, claiming it was awra, an intimate part of a woman’s body that should be covered to avoid sexual attention. Galya is a Muslim woman. She fasts during Ramadan and turns to prayer when times are tough. Still, it was clear that Galya’s practice of Islam differed from some of the refugees she served.

The story about the little boy with scissors was an outlier. Galya often built upon shared Islamic beliefs and values to establish rapport with refugees and provide counsel. I watched Galya invoke Quranic verses to comfort grieving refugees and, in an extreme case, make a promise to reunite a refugee man with his child with God as her witness.

Navigating Gendered Expectations

Galya was promoted within her international aid organization, and with this responsibility came increased travel throughout Jordan. She began to serve refugees in informal tented settlements (ITS), which are informal refugee camps comprised of small Bedouin-like communities living in tents. Families and their extended relatives usually live together in these camps, which are often established next to Jordanian farmlands. ITS residents are nomadic. People follow seasonal farm work, often traveling from the south of Jordan to the north. But, a nomadic life in exile has several challenges. Syrian families often forego access to resources, including education, that may otherwise be readily available to urban-dwelling refugees and those who live in formalized camps. Farmlands are far from schools, and the necessity to follow seasonal crops means that families do not stay in one place long enough for children to attend formal schooling. Galya’s responsibility was to reach Syrian children that were out of school.

While her official job description required that Galya provide children with education, she did much more. Galya worked long hours helping to pitch the school tent, create the curriculum, and train the teachers. She facilitated doctor’s visits, advocated for refugees with legal issues, arbitrated disagreements between refugees and farmers, and represented her NGO to international visitors in an effort to solicit donor funds. She was the main contact for Syrians in the ITS camps that she visited. She carried two cell phones and both rang often, sometimes simultaneously. Galya always answered. 

Occasionally, Galya benefited from conservative gender norms. On one of our visits to an ITS, Galya and I were offered water to drink. This can be an awkward position for an aid worker. Galya did not want to refuse the offer for fear of being rude to the Syrian family that had invited us into their tent. So much of Galya’s work depended on the close relationships she developed with Syrian refugees. She also sincerely cared about the people that we were meeting, many of whom she had known for years.

But, drinking unfiltered water can be a health risk – one that Galya has taken and regretted in the past. To navigate this social situation, Galya politely declined the water and said to our host: “I have to tell you something, but it’s a little awkward, so please forgive me for saying this. You see, I am traveling with these boys all day in the car. (There were two male aid workers with us on this day.) We leave at nine in the morning and sometimes we don’t get back to Amman until six at night. And you know, as a girl, I am too embarrassed to tell them I have to use the bathroom. So please forgive me, but I have to avoid drinking anything.” She continued jokingly, “Could you imagine if I had to tell the boys to stop for me to use the restroom?” Everyone laughed as if this were an absurd suggestion. Whether or not our host knew that Galya was deflecting her kind gesture, these gendered expectations allowed both Galya and our host to accept an alternative to drinking unfiltered water.

Reimagining Gender Roles at Work

Galya was very comfortable in the car with the male aid workers and never hesitated to ask for a bathroom break. Galya relied on Waleed, whose formal job description was “the driver.” The day I met Waleed, Galya, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat, made the introductions. “This is Waleed, but we call him Leedo,” she said to me, but looking at him mischievously to watch his reaction as she divulged his nickname. Galya then turned her entire body around to face me, “He knows every narrow road in Jordan. Every alley. Even every rock.” The “rock” comment made her laugh, which made Leedo laugh too.  We left the humanitarian organizations’ headquarters early each morning. We’d stop to fill up gas and stock up on snacks for the long drive from Amman to the outskirts of Mafraq and Irbid. This became a ritual. Leedo always ordered a cup of Turkish coffee, heavy on the sugar, and Galya bought two bags of Lays Max Chili potato chips. They fought over who would pay, and every time, Leedo refused to let Galya pay for our snacks. This too was gendered. The male aid workers we traveled with would never let us pay for snacks if they were in the convenience store.

Galya often said she felt like “one of the boys.” “Don’t call me Galya,” she joked, “Call me Galib.” Galib is a man’s name and a play off of her name. The name change was not only in reference to hanging out with men all day, but was also a remark that aid work was labor-intensive and dirty. We often spoke about how the dust collected in our hair and how sand gelled to our skin. “When I shower, you can see the dirt collect on the floor,” Galya said.

After work one day, we decided to have dinner with another female aid worker, Nisreen.  We parked in front a restaurant specializing in hotdogs that served every conceivable topping one could ever want. We ate in the car with music blasting and talked about new developments at the Jordanian-Syrian border. Nisreen confessed that she would never want to work on the border – it was too dusty and too many days away from home. “We are losing our femininity out here,” Galya said and Nisreen agreed. Nisreen explained that, a few years ago, her family would never have imagined her, as a woman, doing this kind of work.

Conclusion

These short vignettes are important for several reasons. First, they depict everyday life in Jordan. The mundane aspects of refugee reception are often neglected for eye-catching headlines that enumerate the traumas of displacement. Despite the unfathomable losses that refugees have faced, many of the mundane joys and pains of an unsettled life happen in moments like those described above. For example, when Galya answers her phone, she takes responsibility for the needs of the person on the other end of the line. Something as simple as listening to a refugees’ concerns and searching for solutions can make a big difference for those who are dependent upon aid.

Second, Galya’s experiences draw attention to the contributions of Jordanian aid workers whose stories routinely fall outside the scope of analysis. Jordanian aid workers are central to the humanitarian response in Jordan. So often, the discussion of the “Syrian refugee crisis” neglects the particularities of each host country, especially when referring to states in the Middle East as opposed to the West. Syrian displacement in Jordan should not be conflated with Syrian displacement in other parts of the world because the politics of each place matters.  

Third, these short stories highlight the complexities of aid work when humanitarians and refugees share cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities. Jordanians and Syrians also sometimes share familial and business ties (for more on labor migration ties between Syrians and Jordanians, keep an eye out for Ann-Christin Wagner’s research in progress). Galya’s grandmother, for example, is a Syrian woman who spent most of her childhood in Syria. However, these shared attributes do not negate important distinctions between Jordanian aid workers and Syrian refugees that can also fall along cultural and religious lines.

Finally, gendered expectations are renegotiated when Jordanian women take on new roles in their society as humanitarian aid workers. Galya invokes familiar gendered expectations to navigate social situations while at the same time recognizes that ascribed gendered expectations have been changing. Ten-hour shifts and hard, dirty work have given her a sense of accomplishment and self-reliance. In her role as a refugee advocate, Galya has entered masculine spaces (including government ministries) and spoken up to her male superiors with confidence. Still, Galya also reminisces about a more “feminine” version of herself, who she once envisioned she may become. These stories provide some insight into the emotional work that humanitarian aid requires of Jordanian women.

*All quotations have been translated by the author from Arabic to English. All names were changed to protect the identity of the participants. This research and data analysis were conducted with generous support from the National Science Foundation, P.E.O., Marye Anne Fox Endowed Fellowship, and the American Center for Oriental Research.

By Rawan Arar, Ph.D.

Learn more about Dr. Arar’s research at https://watson.brown.edu/people/postdocs/arar

The post “Call me Galib”: Navigating Gender as a Local Humanitarian Aid Worker appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Growing up in Beirut and witnessing the beginning of the Lebanese civil war shaped Dr. Olmsted’s research interests, which focus on the short and long term gendered impact of armed conflict on economic outcomes.  After completing her Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, she received her Master’s in Agricultural Economics and her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Davis. Her PhD dissertation involved living in the West Bank and conducting a household survey in the greater Bethlehem area. Since completing her PhD, Dr. Olmsted has written extensively on the topics of gender, economics, and globalization, with a particular focus on the Middle East.

Dr. Olmsted has extensive experience in the policy arena as well, having taken a leave from Drew to serve as the Gender Advisor at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), among other positions. She was guest editor of, and contributing author to, a 2014 issue of Feminist Economics, focusing on gender and economics in Muslim communities. She has also published numerous articles, in a range of books and journals, including in the journals History of the Family, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, and World Development.

While at ACOR she plans to extend her study of gendered conflict economies with a focus on the Syrian crisis. Her particular focus will be on analyzing the ways in which social sustainability is undermined by armed conflict, as well as identifying concrete strategies that individuals and refugee communities deploy in order to survive and hopefully thrive, despite severe hardships and challenges. Key to this process will be gaining a better understanding of the intersection between psycho-social and economic well-being and the degree to which humanitarian organizations integrate these two angles into their responses.

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Lillian’s dissertation aims to explain variations in the sets of rights and forms of citizenship statuses that host states offer to protracted refugee groups, including shifts in formal laws as well as the informal enforcement of these policies. Protracted refugees are groups of 25,000 or more refugees with the same nationality living in the same developing country for at least five years. Lillian’s research in Jordan focuses on citizenship policies toward different groups of Palestinian refugees over time—cumulatively, the oldest and largest group of protracted refugees. Her research, to a lesser extent, also examines Jordan’s policies toward Syrian and Iraqi refugees. As an ACOR fellow, she builds on ten months of prior dissertation research in Jordan, conducted with support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program from 2016–2017 as well as GWU’s Institute for Middle East Studies in 2016.

Lillian’s interest in Jordan dates back to her time as an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia (UVa), where her Arabic professor (Dr. Mohammed Sawaie) encouraged her to study abroad at Yarmouk University. She did so over the summer of 2009, while also squeezing in trips to Syria and Egypt during breaks. She returned to Irbid in January 2011 to conduct research for her bachelor’s thesis, which examined the influence of Al-Jazeera Arabic on political attitudes and identities in Jordan. Since then, she has returned several times to visit close friends living outside of Irbid. As a Master of Public Policy student at UVa, Lillian conducted research in Lebanon for American Near East Refugee Aid, where she focused on analyzing a women’s urban agriculture project in Ein el-Helweh refugee camp. Before starting her Ph.D. at GWU, she also worked with the World Bank on social protection projects in the Palestinian Territories, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

See Lillian’s website for her contact information, CV, and further details on her research.

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