Bshara is a conservation architect and anthropologist. He is currently the co-director of RIWAQ where he has been working since 1994. He got his BA in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University (1996), and MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (2000). Interested in space and memory, in 2007 Bshara joined the graduate program of social and cultural anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where he obtained his MA in anthropology in 2009, and his PhD in 2012. Bshara carried out many architectural design and architectural conservation projects in Palestine. In addition, he is the author and co-author of number of books and articles, including Tashgheel-Job Creation through Restoration 2001-2011 (2011), Riwaq’s Guidelines for Maintenance and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Palestine (2005), and Ramallah, Architecture and History (2002).

Three Stories From a Camp
Saturday November 24, 2012 at 14:00 – Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp by Khaldun Bshara

In this lecture will be narrated three stories from a refugee camp to complicate our understanding of resilience, resistance, and the gender component of exile. My claim is that there is a discontinuity and fragmentation of our understanding of the refugee camp (the life and the space); there is a subtle resistance driven by hope manifested in the everyday practices; and there is a hidden but important gender quality of the resistance, in which female refugees occupy a different subject position than male refugees. I attach a non published article about spatial practices in the refugee camp to be read in advance, and can be a medium for questions and answers after the story-telling lecture, as well as an anchor of the anecdotes in space and time.

Reading Materials

The spatial practices in the Palestinian refugee camps [ENG]
The Palestinian refugee camps, as they stand today, are the result of long and ongoing spatial processes…

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lecture: Three Stories From a Camp by Khaldun Bshara – Part 1

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