“Who does know how to go back home?” Overlapping spatio-temporalities of exile in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps

Despite being historically spatially contracted and socially constrained, Palestinian camps in Lebanon have turned once more into “transitional zones of emplacement” (Janmyr and Knudsen, 2016) for thousands of people recently fleeing the Syrian conflict. The research investigates how refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility and develop a wide range of daily practices that extends beyond the camp's boundaries, exploring how imperceptible and hyper-mobile tactics of existence re-elaborate Palestinian refugee camps into meaningful places of elusive contestation. Moving from newcomers’ strategies for protection mainly mainly performed during nighttime, my work expounds on how refugees reinterpret boundaries between camps and “forms of camp spaces” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh, 2013) through a wide spectrum of practices grounded on translocal informal networks. Mainly grounded on two-year fieldwork started in 2014, the research hinges on the interconnectivities evolving around the Palestinian Bourj el Barajneh camp and Hezbollah-controlled Beirut southern suburbs.After playing for several months with tens of young Palestinian and Syrian young men informally gathering at the pitch, I significantly deepened my presence and connections in the camp by becoming part of one football team regularly playing in the camp.By extensively investigating practices of mutual recognition and invisibility emerging between the “habitual” residents and Syria’s refugees inside and outside the football field, my work focuses on how transnational discourses and outdoor practices in locality effectively contest international gaps in protection, national securitization policies and arbitrary measures by local non-state actors.