For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had long lived in Syria as refugees, the advent of civil war in 2011 occasioned not a first experience of displacement but rather another iteration of enforced migration, necessitating encounters with new places of refuge.

Matthew DeMaio, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College, traces the history of Damascus’s Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp and considers how, upon Yarmouk’s depopulation, its former residents have accumulated material, social and affective ties to new places of residence through everyday practices of dwelling. Based on ethnographic research with former Yarmouk residents now living across Jordan, Lebanon, Europe and the United States, as well as archival and digital methods, DeMaio demonstrates that the various places to which these refugees have accumulated attachments are not bounded or experienced in isolation. Rather, placemaking practices that occur within one locality are shaped by, and reciprocally reshape, attachments to, and understandings of, the whole palimpsest of places that these refugees have accumulated through lifetimes and generations of movement. DeMaio illuminates that for many refugees, and for Palestinian refugees in particular, displacement is not a singular experience in the past but an ongoing and iterative process.

Presented by Global Studies, Sociology & Anthropology, & The Center of Global Islamic Studies