In Search of Al Wehdat Camp: A Study of Paths, Edges and Walls and their Production of Transient Territories in Palestinian Refugee Camps

Al Wehdat Camp, like all Palestinian refugee camps, was built in response to Al Nakba, as a space of temporary refuge to generations of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their homes. In this research, I conceptualized home as a multi-scalar territory that exists in different places, in different time intervals, all at once, through a spatio-temporal simultaneity that produces Al Wehdat Camp as a transient territory, that exists here and there, now and then, at home and in exile. Through the different chapters of this dissertation, I studied those different scales of home, the home-land, the home-city, the home-camp and the home-home, through an interdisciplinary research approach and framework that were built around three pillars: the body, movement, and territory. In my research, I studied a number of paths of displacement that the Palestinian refugees have traveled across during their uprooting from Palestine, mapping their movement to get to Al Wehdat Camp. Through that tracing of the different paths, I was able to conceptualize the camp as a point that exists at the intersection of a number of paths that have led the Palestinian refugees to the camp and also allowed them to move past it to different locations within the city. That continuous movement of displaced bodies from Palestine to Jordan have allowed the Palestinian refugees to transgress the colonial borders that has disconnected them from the space of the home-land, and allowed them to reproduce the space of Palestine in Al Wehdat Camp.