Ayham Dalal

ayham

PhD Student, Technische Universität Berlin

Personal page: http://habitat-unit.de/en/team/ayham-dalal/

Academia page: https://tu-berlin.academia.edu/AyhamDalal

 

 

Biography

Ayham Dalal is a PhD student at the Technische Universität Berlin, Department of International Urbanism and Design (Habitat Unit). He studied Architectural Engineering in Syria, and Urban Studies in Stuttgart, Tunis and Cairo. His research interests in regard to urban space are informality, identity politics, conflict and power. Recently, Ayham has organized the Syrian Urban Research Network (SURN), and was invited to contribute to the Amnesty International Conference in Istanbul and the UNESCO initiative for safeguarding the Syrian Urban Heritage (YEF). He taught at the German University of Technology in Oman, and currently at the Technische Universität Berlin. He has several publications in English and Arabic, with translations in German and Turkish.

Research Project

His doctoral research focuses on the impact of Syrian refugees and the humanitarian presence on the urbanization trends in Jordan. It builds on the findings of his master thesis ‘Mapping the Urbanization of Zaatari Camp’ to investigate how refugees utilize memory, cultural knowledge, local networks and power to negotiate the production of the everyday-life space in Zaatari camp. Simultaneously, it asks how humanitarian policies, toolkits and planning paradigm evolved vis-a-vis the production of different accommodation typologies for Syrian refugees in Jordan. This project is funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austtauschdienst (DAAD) through the Leadership for Syria program.

Keywords

Urbanization, Humanitarianism, Refugee Camps, Informality

 

Léa Macias

leamaciasPhD student

EHESS – Paris, France / Ifpo – Amman, Jordan

 

 

 

Biography

Léa Macias is a PhD student in contemporary anthropology at EHESS (Paris) under the supervision of Michel Agier (EHESS- IIAC/IRD) and Kamel Doraï (CNRS/Ifpo). She holds a master’s degree in Development Studies from IEDES (Paris 1 Sorbonne University) and conducted humanitarian needs assessments in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and the Balkans between 2014-2016 for an NGO. Her PhD research focuses on the development of statistical tools and information management initiatives in the humanitarian sector. Her research aims at exploring the statistical tools used and data collected by various humanitarian actors in refugee camp settings and later measuring its impacts on the humanitarian intervention, the geography of the camp and the refugees involved in these exercises.

Research project

Her research falls into the topic of refugee politics of the Lajeh project (axis 3). The focus of this research will be the politics and mechanisms of humanitarian data production and management in the second largest camp in the world, and the fourth “city” of Jordan, Zaatari refugee camp. Based on in-depth field investigations this research intends to conduct interviews with humanitarian stakeholders, field workers and Syrian refugees as well as to explore databases compiled by various UN Agencies and NGOs in Jordan. The role of information management as a product and agent of the remodelling of the humanitarian space will be at the core of this research.

Key words

Refugee camp, data, information management, geography, humanitarian aid, Zaatari