Palestinians share a history of exile oriented towards the loss and reclamation of a homeland, often expressed through a shared visual lexicon and mythos. In the context of refugee camps, however, local visual culture and everyday practices demonstrate how Palestinian lives are also grounded in local stories and experiences. How do Palestinian refugees deploy everyday practices to create their home spaces? What can these practices reveal about refugees’ myriad belongings? And, in thinking about these practices, what can be said about how a feeling of home can be articulated in exile, which is at its heart the forced removal/dislocation from home? This article uses a comparative ethnographic analysis of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon to challenge overarching narratives of ‘Palestinianness’ by calling attention to the rich multiplicity of Palestinian refugee identities. In focusing the analysis on everyday practices ‐ specifically street art and walking ‐ by which residents make and experience home in the camps, the article grapples with the seeming contradictions between ‘home’ and ‘exile’ that colour the experiences of not only Palestinians, but also refugees and asylum seekers in other circumstances of protracted uncertainty, as they attempt to migrate and make home in new countries.

More than 20 years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), reconciliation remains elusive. A number of factors contribute to this stasis. No agreed-upon historical narrative exists by which Lebanon’s 18 ethnoreligious groups can make sense of the war, and the state has interests – both economic and political – for burying common memories and erasing common spaces. In light of these erasures, the capital Beirut, like much of the country, remains divided along spatial, ideological, and mnemonic lines.

The extant literature has generally considered the perils of what Samir Khalaf (2006) calls Beirut’s “geography of fear.” By contrast, this dissertation considers the city a realm of possibility. “Re-membering Beirut: Performing Memory and Community Across a ‘Postwar’ City,” fuses ethnographic research, analysis, and performative writing to introduce the ide of “re-membering,” a term I use to describe how people engage the residual material of the city-at-war – its textures, tempos, routes, and representations – to render legible the shared pasts and current political claims of historically divided communities. Through case studies including a walking tour, a protest, and street art, I argue for considering the city’s in-between spaces as loci for emergent cross-communal politics, and for movement as both object of analysis and method. The sometimes ephemeral publics that take shape around these performances and practices reconfigure how Beirutis understand themselves in relation to their city and each other, whilc simultaneously revealing the city’s persistent ideological and spatial terrain.

The project contributes to a fuller picture of how people across the Middle East and North Africa (the MENA region) are using urban space and cultural production – in the wake of the Arab revolutions and most urgently in the midst of the ongoing Syrian crisis – to communicate shared pain and dissent, and to mobilize in the face of failing or oppressive political systems. As the region once again divides itself along both old and new fault lines, the study explores the perils of occluding violent histories, as well as the critical role of culture in inter-communal postwar healing.

Despite many podcasts that take an oral history format or are about oral history as a method, there is very little research that critically connects podcasting to oral history or theorises about the possibilities of podcasting as an oral history practice. This article draws on recent research that argues for a focus on the work around podcasting praxis as an important site of analysis for understanding the community-building potential of podcasting work, especially in the context of migration and diaspora, where non-Western migrants are often not treated as the authorities of their own (hi)stories. In examining two episodes of Kerning Cultures and drawing on concepts from oral history, I develop the concept of shareable authority, a term that links oral history methods to digital media practice and scope. The article offers a contribution to oral history practice, as it demonstrates numerous methods for making authority more shareable between many collaborators and making the distribution of authority more transparent, both of which have implications for power-sharing and decolonial knowledge production. 

Working at the intersection of migration studies and radio studies, we interrogate podcasting’s potential as a practice-based activist research method. This article documents podcasting’s role in an ethnographic project conducted together with Konstkupan (The Art Hive), a migrant-focused community arts space in Malmö, Sweden. We argue that the value of podcasting as a practice-based research method exists in its potential to function as a boundary object. Boundary objects are technologies and processes bridging social worlds and providing sites of communication and translation between groups. Challenging narratives that detect a decline in podcasting’s radical potential, we argue that as a boundary object, podcasting’s political significance continues in how it convenes small, diverse, but attentive ‘listening publics’. A boundary object does not demand consensus on the meanings or representations it produces, affording space for both the synchrony and dissonance of narratives produced by migrants.

Scholarly work addressing art and migration has clustered around certain themes: art as therapy, art as expression of identity and memory, art as political mobilization, and art as integration. Similarly, scholars have noted the significance of tattoo art in terms of embodied identity and reclaiming the self after trauma. The overlap between these literatures remains a largely unexplored area of inquiry. This article examines tattooing as an everyday artistic practice in a refugee’s post-migration life. Through an ethnographic case study focusing on Kash, an Iranian man who sought asylum in Sweden, I theorize tattooing as intercultural bridgework (Anzaldúa 2002) functioning in three ways: self-expression, a mode of social integration, and ultimately a transferable skill. This article argues for considering tattoo art as a sustainable (meaning, something that can sustain the artist) art form in the post-migration context. A focus on tattooing as a refugee/migrant practice presents a novel contribution to work on migration and art and allows for an examination of the embodied intersections of expression and integration outside the realm of project-based research.

The present report is an attempt to provide an overview over intersecting beginnings,

emergencies, and prolongations that reinforces a theoretical reflection on contemporary

cultural debate and its repercussions on societal development. With the current research

overview, we want to draw attention to assumptions about culture(s), as they are played out in

the intersection of migration and sustainable urban development. Multi-layered and doubleedged,

‘culture’ often comes with territorial postulates and implicit ideas about belongings and

borders, movements and rights of priority. The report approaches these entangled issues from

several angles. With the point of departure in current environmental policy, the first section of

the report, therefore, approaches ideas of “sustainability” via the notions of “culture” and

“locality”. A second section briefly discusses the methodological challenges of researching

emergent cultural phenomena across both geographical and disciplinary borders. In a third

section, we turn to three research reports, a sampling of the report literature, but representative

of how global, regional and local perspectives on culture today are ‘scaffolded’ in relation to

mobility and migration. A fourth section introduces emergent transversal, i.e. non-categorical,

approaches to cultural research, primarily focusing on how notions such as transnationalism

and translocality may inform new modes of research and urban development. A fifth section

finally, articulates some recommendations about how to relate to translocal space and

translocal subjectivities in practice and how to craft research approaches that not only involve

interlocutors but also answers to and actively engage in current spatial and cultural changes.