Lombardo, Ilaria. 2025. Decolonisation through Art and Culture: The Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp as a Space of Commoning. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

My research proposes to remedy the lack of critical literature on cultural and artistic production within refugee camps. Focusing on the exceptional spatial, legal and temporal status of the Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine, I consider art as an essential form of subaltern culture that contests the Israeli, Western and humanitarian conceptualisations of space, citizenship and knowledge. Specifically, I aim to understand how counter-narratives emerging from artistic and spatial practices in Dheisheh have an active role in producing subversive spaces and political imaginaries. The camp’s space is co-produced by its inhabitants who share the everyday life of the camp, the memory of historical Palestine, political imaginaries of return and the ‘permanent temporariness’ of their refugee status. Using a post- and decolonial approach, with an emphasis on subaltern agency, I analyse the emergence of everyday spaces of commoning that remain underexplored in literature on refugee camps. I question how the latter, read as active counter-spaces, might challenge existing conceptions of refugee camps as passive spaces of pure biopolitics, introducing alternative ways of understanding space. I read the Dheisheh camp as an intensely anti-hierarchical space that can offer its own counter-narrative through its being outside the hegemonic political and spatial narrative and, at the same time, inside the sphere of politics. Thus, I understand the artistic production emerging from the Dheisheh camp as a deeply political gesture that is indissolubly linked to the space where it takes form. Specifically, I analyse the role of graffiti, hip hop and dance (Palestinian dabka) in the camp by paying attention to the Palestinian artistic and political tradition and to the specific context of Dheisheh. Building upon my fieldworks in the camp, in 2014 and 2022, I explore Dheishehan artistic production by focusing on issues related to temporariness, space, representation, agency, right to return and decolonisation.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00039387
Keywords:	Refugee camp; Palestine; Commoning; Graffiti; Hip Hop; Dabka
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Date:	31 July 2025
Item ID:	39387
Date Deposited:	14 Aug 2025 13:08
Last Modified:	14 Aug 2025 13:13
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39387

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