This individual is a guest contributor. MEI is not able to assist with contact requests.
Cathrine Brun is Director of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) at Oxford Brookes University. Prior to assuming this post in 2015, Dr. Brun was Professor of Human Geography and Director of Research and Director of the Norwegian Researcher School for Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She has worked for 20 years on forced migration as a result of conflict and disasters. Currently, Dr. Brun is working particularly on humanitarianism in protracted displacement and chronic crises and with housing for forced migrants. Much of her work has been in urban contexts and in camps. As a human geographer, she is interested in how, in chronic crises and displacement, the relationships between people and places change due to displacement, with a view to understanding the relationships between displaced and their hosts and notions of housing and home. Her work often emphasises how people who experience crises deal with adversity – especially how they strategise and manoeuvre in the course of encounters with institutions and regimes.
Protracted Refugee Displacement in the Middle East: Making Home in Limbo?
This essay examines a key policy assumption behind the concept Protracted Refugee Situations—the notion that the refugee predicament, “limbo,” can only be resolved through going Home as defined within a nation-state framework. The authors’ proposal—that refugees can make home without necessarily going home—offers an alternative, refugee-centered perspective of home as a “constellation” of practices, strategies, and ideas.
