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" ‘At Home in the World’: Iraqi Refugees in Jordan and the Search for Comfort "
El Dardiry, Giulia
Galaty, John
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1058896
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| Doc. No
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TL58013
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| Main Entry
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El Dardiry, Giulia
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| Title & Author
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‘At Home in the World’: Iraqi Refugees in Jordan and the Search for Comfort\ El Dardiry, GiuliaGalaty, John
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| College
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McGill University (Canada)
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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371 p.
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| Abstract
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In the decade following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, thousands of Iraqis made their way to neighbouring Jordan, where many spent years living. Unlike other major refugee groups in the region, such as Palestinians or, more recently, Syrians, Iraqis in Jordan during this period were overwhelmingly educated, middle-class professionals. They self-settled throughout Amman and were generally financially better off than many of their Jordanian hosts. While most eventually registered with the UN in the hopes of being resettlement outside of the Middle East, many did so several years after being in Jordan. Based on 18 months of fieldwork with Iraqis in Amman between 2010 and 2013, this dissertation is an examination of the dynamics of Iraqi mobility into and out of Jordan following the US-led invasion. Specifically, it explores how concepts and experiences of home were being reimagined and reconfigured among Iraqis. As Iraqis spoke to me of their departures from Iraq and as I shared their lives in Jordan, it became clear that they experienced their ‘displacement’ less as an ‘event’ that had occurred to them than as an ambiguous and open-ended process that extended over time and across places. They sought to construct a sense of home that was fundamentally affective—what they termed “a sense of comfort” in the world. As Iraqis moved across the destabilised terrains of Iraq, Jordan, and beyond, how was their sense of comfort—of being at home in the world—alternately cultivated and undermined? Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of “equipment,” I argue that Iraqi experiences of displacement and of home should neither be understood as binary (home / not home) nor as dominated solely by legal or financial concerns. Iraqis assessed the comfort, and thus liveability, of various places in ways that were multi-layered, contradictory, and shifting. In illustrating this, I contend that Iraqi patterns of mobility and emplacement were intimately tied not only to the specific configurations of laws, people, and opportunities available to them in various places, but also—and especially—to the amount of labour that was required to sustain a sense of comfort.
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Humanitarianism
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International agreements
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Migration
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Philosophy
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Refugees
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Society
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Galaty, John
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McGill University (Canada)
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