PHD
PhD Thesis Title: Practicing Time in Humanitarian Waiting-scapes
PhD Supervisors: Profs. Anna Leander and Jonathan Luke Austin
This thesis explores the practices that shape, sustain, and transform waiting in the delivery of humanitarian programs. Waiting unfolds around consultation rooms, humanitarian tents, registration and distribution points as individuals queue in long lines. Waiting for cash and vouchers, medication, information, a listening hear. Sometimes, humanitarian waiting moves online, staring at SMS notifications or a humanitarian application - algorithmic waiting. Waiting is about the senses. We shift our weight from one leg to the other when one tires. Waiting is about emotions. Boredom, anxiety, and excitement can alternate and mix in a weird mishmash. Everybody waits, but waiting is also political and not simply a reflection of the human condition. Time and uncertainty are unevenly distributed, forging, and forged by relationships mediated by gender, class, race, and power relations. There are also forms of humanitarian waiting that persist long after direct violence has stopped. For instance, forms of suspension surround the presence of suspected landmines, as people wait for humanitarian demining operations to clear the land. In these areas, the land itself seems to “wait,” frozen in time. What strategies, gestures, interactions, and their material arrangements emerge within these waiting-scapes? How do time politics organize daily life and shapes social and economic relations within humanitarian infrastructures?
The present research uses ethnography and rhythmanalysis across three sites: Nakivale (Uganda), the Darién (Colombia–Panama borderland), and Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Taking them together makes it possible to approach humanitarian waiting not as a singular temporal condition but to explore bundles of rhythms, from the times of dwelling in a humanitarian settlement (Nakivale), through to those of fading humanitarian presence with return migration and NGOs' departure (Darièn), to the sedimentation of long-term humanitarian afterlives.
Profile
Nora Doukkali is a PhD candidate in International Relations and Political Sciences.Her doctoral research focuses on time politics and humanitarian waiting. She is also a Research Assistant for the SNSF-funded project Future of Humanitarian Design (2023-2027). This research collective investigates humanitarianism and its relationship to design, technology, visual representations and political life through research-creation. The project combines insights from architects, engineers, social scientists and humanitarian workers. Before joining the research project, she worked at the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Project Management Office. She holds a Master in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute.
Research Interests
- Humanitarianism
- Time Politics and Rhythmanalysis
- (Post)-conflict Place-making and Memory
- Critical Architecture and Design
- Visual Studies