Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.
Humanitarian Predicaments: Protracted Displacement and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Please join us on Wednesday, February 6th for a lecture by Ilana Feldman (Anthropology, George Washington University), who will be visiting campus as part of the “Contending Visions of the Middle East” series. Ilana’s lecture draws from her recently published book “Life Lived In Relief” (University of California Press, 2018).
February 6
4:30 – 6:00 PM | SCI 101
Humanitarian Predicaments: Protracted Displacement and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Ilana Feldman (George Washington University)
Sponsored by the President’s Office Andrew W. Mellon Grant, The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and the Departments of Political Science, History, Sociology / Anthropology, and Peace and Conflict Studies. For a full schedule of spring events, please consult our website: https://contendingvisions.wixsite.com/mysite