Garland, Natalie;
(2025)
The Everyday Burden of Dignity: An Exploration of Syrian Refugeehood in Bekaa, Lebanon.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This doctoral dissertation uncovers the lived experience of dignity amongst Syrian refugees in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. I apply an immersive longitudinal community-based approach (2021-2023), working closely with a team of four Syrian researchers. The use of participant observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions evoke the ways in which dignity is socially constructed through space and time. Analysed through the concepts of subjectivity, spatiality, agency, and temporality, the empirical data tells a site-specific story of the simultaneous loss and preservation of dignity in exile. As such, I engage with dignity as an overlooked object of anthropological inquiry. In particular, I examine how dignity operates across society, gender, generation, future and past desires, as well as within the physical spaces of the home, school, bakery, border, and humanitarian intervention. This refugee-centered analysis complicates Western liberal philosophy, revealing how dignity in exile is far from inherent, but rather an embodied endeavor of continuous preservation. Expanding upon a thin body of critical dignity theory, I urgently rethink this concept as inherently emotional, relational, processual, and in constant renegotiation, developing new knowledge on dignity in refuge as burden. This research contributes a novel ‘dignity lens,’ a new methodological and analytical approach that pluralizes sites of everyday dignity, revealing an agentic and precarious lived experience core to subject making in contexts of dispossession. The proposed lens offers an ethical and immersive framework for locating and unpicking sites of dignity exploitation, problematizing the often overlooked socio-political entanglements undermining this essential feeling to humanity.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Everyday Burden of Dignity: An Exploration of Syrian Refugeehood in Bekaa, Lebanon |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > UCL Institute for Global Prosperity |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214854 |
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