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And yet they’re moving! How Syrian refugees and aid workers’ material practices shape urban humanitarian spaceAnn-Christin WagnerThe seminar will take place at Ifpo at 10 am (the seminar is not opened to public)Abstract:In the intellectual tradition of Arendt, Foucault and Agamben, the anthropology of humanitarianism has for a long time focused on refugee camps as “spaces of exception” where the displaced are stuck and subject to new forms of (bio)politics. However, as in the case of the Syrian civil war, most Syrians exiled to neighbouring countries struggle to survive in urban contexts. Moreover, my own ethnographic research reveals that Syrian refugees in Jordan - more than 80% of which live outside camps – remain highly mobile and embedded into wider regional migration dynamics.Hence, I suggest to investigate Syrians’ mobilities in Jordan as a prism through which refugees’ intertwined experiences of perpetual stasis and movement in limbo can be brought into view. Building on Lisa Smirl’s spatial approach to humanitarian intervention, I urge to take seriously the material ways in which specific physical environments and the corporeal presence of aid workers shape practices of aid delivery and – in turn - understandings of “refugeness” and “spaces of aid” in humanitarian imagination. In particular, the suggested research brings into view aid workers’ movements in an urban setting, but also mobility strategies through which Syrian refugees in urban Jordan negotiate and contest inequalities of power produced by aid agencies’ spatial modes.The proposed paper is part of a PhD project in Social Anthropology, investigating the relationship between protracted displacement and stalled mobilities. It is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees in a provincial town in the north of Jordan, drawing inspiration from volunteering experiences with various faith-based and secular aid organisations.