Panel: Design for acceptance: how socio-technical imagination meets design in proofing refugee environments for the future

Abstract

As the number of protracted refugee camps and settlements on the African and Asian continent solidified in the past decades, an increasing focus on such sites as opportunities for development emerged in its wake. This comes in time for the likelihood of protracted and compounded crises to resolve seems distant. Climate change, protracted armed conflicts, religious fundamentalism, and failed development aspirations, have led people to seek safety and opportunities elsewhere, and will do so for some time to come. In practice however, many people get stuck in camps and settlements along the way. Instead of continuing to posit these sites as temporary solutions to temporary crises, other ideas have emerged. Refugee camps are projected as cities in the making and sites for investment and innovation, building on the inevitability of their long-term existence, the dynamics of refugee-host relations, the human creativity of their inhabitants and the evolution of humanitarian governance.

This panel explores what lies beyond emergency discourses and humanitarian temporalities to project alternative futures for people on the move in specific protracted refugee environments in Africa, Asia and beyond. By revisiting artistic expressions and design, contemporary political and humanitarian barriers and impossibilities can be crossed, to explore what potential lies beyond current constraints, but also what potential risks this may carry.

The panel invites contributions that explore, review, or criticize how art and design feed sociotechnical imaginations as alternative future scenarios for refugee hosting.

in-person event