Provisional PhD Thesis Title: The Afterlife of a Humanitarian Emergency: Bureaucratizing humanitarian aid and refugee life in Jordan
Expected Completion Date: Fall 2024
Situated in Jordan, a ‘humanitarian hub’ of the Middle East, this research examines the role of bureaucracy in producing and (re)shaping humanitarian time and space, its effects on the everyday life and work for local humanitarians and refugees, and how they navigate in, with and along its procedures. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees and Jordanian humanitarian workers in urban spaces, Azraq refugee camp and irregular tented settlements (ITSs) it traces their participations with the bureaucratic apparatus. Following their everyday bureaucratic engagements – extending from street-level encounters of registrations and assessments, third country resettlement procedures, to report writings and staff meetings – it attends to the imaginary power of bureaucratic processes and the documents they produce. Against the presupposition that it always operates in an endless present empty of anticipation, examining humanitarianism from the vantage point of bureaucracy allows for situating it in a larger timeframe that accommodates the emergency, its imagined futures, near and far ones, and its aftermath all together. As such, this research reveals, beyond the ways it undermines the universal self-formulated goals of humanitarianism, the role of bureaucracy in (re)shaping and sustaining not only life in displacement, but also the humanitarian structure itself.
Hanna’s academic background is in Semitic languages and Middle East studies, and her current research works across theoretical conversations on humanitarian interventions, practice and governance in the Middle East region, and anthropology of documents and bureaucracy. Recently, she has also been engaged in the MENA-track of the Institute’s executive master program, Development Policies and Practices. During the fall 2023 she supervised humanitarian professionals in their thesis writing on various geographical and topical areas within the realm of humanitarianism in the MENA region.
Teaching assistant 2020-2021, 2023-2024.