Vision

Vision

A wealth of contributions provides the content of this issue of the Collective Dictionary aimed at forcing the perception of the future and, consequentially, that of the present. One of the goals of Campus in Camps is to ground learning processes in rooted experience, to weave together elements for a new kind of project able […]

Common I

Common I

Departing from personal experiences, the authors are exploring the concepts and practices related to the *common. How can a heightened attention to the common, grounded and growing yet also contested in the refugee camps, shift the discourse of Palestinian refugeehood and the way the right of return is imagined and articulated? Contributors: Nedaa Hamouz, Nabà […]

Participation

Participation

The aim of these examples is to look at how three quintessentially quotidian actions – walking, cleaning and cooking – can take on socio-political connotations. Simply by being shifted actions onto non-habitual contexts and opening them up to a broader and more aware *participation, allows questions to be raised as to how inhabitants of the […]

Responsibility

Responsibility

Looking at the history of the camp, we noticed that most actions moving directly from the people were motivated by a sense of *responsibility toward the camp itself and what goes on around it, politically, economically and socially. We decided to try to find the source of this sense of responsibility, which regularly is divided […]

Well-being

Well-being

Our work on the term *well-being is based on interviews and discussions with people living in the camps, the vast majority of whom defined the term in relation to physiological and body health. Our contribution is aimed at making a distinction between health and well-being. We felt this was necessary because it is rare to […]

Citizenship

Citizenship

After studying a number of definitions for the terms watan and mwatana, we came to form our own point of view on these words: we cannot define mwatana without defining watan and what it means for everyone. Watan is an idea and practice that is so important to some people that they build their lives […]

Relation

Relation

Hinging on the concept of *relation, our walk from Arroub to Souliman’s pools stems from a will to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of different camps throughout the geographical area crossed. A two-day trek searching for the traces of an Ancient Roman aqueduct became the pretense for moments of reflection on different aspects of relationships […]

Knowledge

Knowledge

Over the last two centuries, *knowledge has been categorized and limited by the academic system through its methods of certification and verification. This has led to the exclusion of a broad range of skills, abilities, and wisdom based on lived and rooted experience. The result is the packed knowledge provided by educational institutions which ignore […]

Common II

Common II

The public and private in Palestinian camps have no legal, social or political meaning. Nether private nor public property exists in camps. However, the history of displacement and the destroyed villages are what we share in *common. And the camp is our common, neither public nor private. Over the past sixty-four years of displacements, due […]

Ownership

Ownership

This publication look into the idea of exception, through the concepts of *ownership and domination. These two words surfaced during group project proposal meetings and were used as filters to find the exceptional in everyday camp life. Contributors: Alaa Al-Homouz, Ayat Al-Turshan, Aysar Al-Saifi, Giuliana Racco, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Marwa Al-Lahham, Matteo Guidi, Saleh Khannah. *The […]

Sustainability

Sustainability

Today there are much more exciting terms to focus on than *sustainability; a word that over recent decades has emerged from the global environmental, economic and social crises and is currently in the spotlight of many project proposals as a sort of “promise for a better world”. Despite the wisdom that sustainability aims to introduce in governance […]

Xenia

Xenia

This booklet is an outcome of the “Ancient Journeys and Migrants” course at the University of Exeter, thinking together with Campus in Camps. In exploring the ancient stories and remains of those who moved through a world without maps, borders, or nation-states, it reveals the shifting attitudes to the outsider – the guest and the […]

Political

Political

This booklet is an outcome from the “Future vocabularies” workgroup at the workshop taught by We Are Here association and BAK (Utrecht and Amsterdam, 5th – 9th April 2016), considering the question of representation within art and politics with regards to refugees’ struggle. The series considers the need for a new lexicon to sustain an […]