Abstract This chapter focuses on the experiences of Syrian refugees living in Jordan and the relational ties they form and sustain across borders and within Jordan. The data was collected during 9 months of ethnographic research in Jordan. The findings from this research reveal the challenges Syrians face in waiting for reunification with their spouses and children in Europe, as well as the challenges of maintaining connections with family and friends still in Syria and in other countries. The findings draw attention to everyday practices during periods of waiting, including dealing with family dynamics and jealousy, and the coping strategies used to maintain relationships. They highlight the tensions, regrets, disclosures and silences affecting separated families. This chapter contributes to knowledge on waiting, family dynamics, gender and mobilities, deepening our understanding of social relationships and relational wellbeing during forced migration, to enable academics and policymakers to understand the complexity of refugees’ everyday experiences during displacement.
Research co-production is recognized as important for humanitarian health actors, as part of the growing drive towards localizing and decolonizing aid. Despite recognition that co-production is challenging to implement, reflexive accounts of co-production efforts remain limited. In this paper, we critically examine the role of co-production within a multi-partner research collaboration in Lebanon involving multiple academic, civil society and government-affiliated partners based in the UK and in Lebanon. Through interactive reflection sessions and interviews with research team partners, we document how co-production principles were embedded into our project, explore contextual factors influencing the collaboration, identify successes and challenges to co-production and identify future opportunities for research co-production. We find mixed understandings of co-production between team members and siloed efforts to co-produce within our partnership. We identify key challenges to co-production including contextual factors related to Lebanon and COVID-19, institutional power dynamics, budgets, difficulties in engaging service users and availability of stakeholders to co-produce, while mapping examples of successful co-production in our project. Our study emphasizes the importance of ensuring shared understandings of the scope of co-production at the outset of projects and suggest the collaborative analysis processes provide a key opportunity for researchers to embed co-production principles.
International humanitarian and development agencies striving to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment sometimes neglect to recognise the power hierarchies present in their own engagement with communities. Drawing on research on Syrian refugees and humanitarian workers in Jordan, this article explores the research and monitoring and evaluation practices of international humanitarian agencies. It suggests that the emphasis on generating evidence has resulted in more transactional and less relational engagement with refugees. This paper asks how feminist values can inform research with refugees, and explores how these values may provide less-extractive ways of engaging with displaced populations.
Key informant interviews are a stalwart of qualitative research, particularly policy-focused research. So ubiquitous is this research method that it is sometimes taken for granted that key informants indeed have important knowledge and value. This commentary interrogates the emphasis that is sometimes placed on key informant interviews over other qualitative research methods, asking important questions including: why are these informants “key,” and who says they are “key”? This article uses a feminist lens to analyze key informant interviews, suggesting that the power and privilege surrounding key informants might inadvertently lead to key informant interviews being less participatory and more infused with vested interests than researchers might admit. Within the hierarchy of research methods, key informant interviews may be positioned as producing more valuable knowledge because of the status and expertise of the person being interviewed. Their “expert” status may lead to assumptions that key informants understand and represent their communities. This article draws attention to the gendered consequences of prioritizing the knowledge of key informants, contrasting this with feminist perspectives on knowledge production which value the voices and perspectives of “ordinary” community members. This article also points to the methodological advantages which power-holders benefit from when they participate in key informant interviews compared to focus group discussions or surveys, advocating for greater community voice (especially women’s voice) through in-depth interviews with “ordinary” women and increased critical analysis of the limits of key informant interviews.
Community participation in health responses in humanitarian crises is increasingly promoted by humanitarian actors to support adoption of measures that are relevant and effective to local needs. Our aim was to understand the role of community participation in humanitarian health responses for conflict-affected populations (including forcibly displaced populations) in low- and middle-income countries and the barriers and facilitators to community participation in healthcare responses. Using a systematic review methodology, following the PRISMA protocol, we searched four bibliographic databases for publications reporting peer-reviewed primary research. Studies were selected if they reported how conflict-affected populations were involved in healthcare responses in low- and middle-income settings, and associated changes in healthcare responses or health outcomes. We applied descriptive thematic synthesis and assessed study quality using study design-specific appraisal tools. Of 18,247 records identified through the database searching, 18 studies met our inclusion criteria. Various types of community participation were observed, with participation mostly involved in implementing interventions rather than framing problems or designing solutions. Most studies on community participation focused on changes in health services (access, utilisation, quality), community acceptability and awareness, and ownership and sustainability. Key barriers and facilitators to community participation included political will at national and local level, ongoing armed conflict, financial and economic factors, socio-cultural dynamics of communities, design of humanitarian responses, health system factors, and health knowledge and beliefs. Included studies were of mixed quality and the overall strength of evidence was weak. More generally there was limited critical engagement with concepts of participation. This review highlights the need for more research on more meaningful community participation in healthcare responses in conflict-affected communities, particularly in framing problems and creating solutions. More robust research is also required linking community participation with longer-term individual and health system outcomes, and that critically engages in constructs of community participation.
Within scholarly literature as well as reports from humanitarian actors, including international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), United Nations agencies and local NGOs, Syrian marriages are often described in static, essentialist ways that reinforce Orientalist assumptions. Based on feminist ethnographic research with Syrian women and men in Jordan, this article explores marriages in historical and intersectional context, before and during displacement. The article challenges common representations of Syrian marriages and advances how Syrian women's power and agency are understood. It emphasizes women's role in deciding to marry (or not) and discusses violence and love in marriage and resistance to proposed love marriages.
Abstract Analysis of gendered power struggles often describes men's use of power over women. In some academic research, as well as analysis by development and humanitarian agencies who seek to promote gender equality, power may be framed narrowly. Such analysis may neglect how family relationships are shaped not only by gender but also by intersections between gender and age. This article is based on feminist ethnographic research among Syrian refugees in Jordan as well as interviews with humanitarian workers. It uses accounts of power struggles between Syrian mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law to illustrate how family dynamics shift as women advance in age. The paper complicates assumptions about men's power, arguing that policy-makers and gender practitioners should also consider how older women use power.
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