Material cultures of refuge in Lebanon

Hadiqa Khan (University College London and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford)

Supervisors: Dr Matthew Davies and Dr Hanna Baumann (UCL), Professor Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum) and Dr Letty Ten Harkel (School of Archaeology, University of Oxford)

Hadiqa completed her BSc in Anthropology and Sociology with a minor in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and came away with special interests in gender, colonialism, social policy, archaeology and religion. She then went on to earn an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Oxford, where she focused on perceptions and representations of gender in the ancient Indus Valley, and was rewarded a distinction for her thesis.

Hadiqa’s CDP project involves undertaking an interdisciplinary study of the human and material cultures of refuge in Lebanon. The project will build upon approaches from anthropology, contemporary archaeology, refugee studies, development studies and the study of materiality. Hadiqa’s research will focus on Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon, their material culture, as well as the landscape which they inhabit. She hopes that through contemporary collecting and participatory documentation, her project would be able to not only critically assess established curatorial thought and practices when faced with the impermanence and precarity of refugee experiences, but also to give voice to such (often invisible) experiences.