Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are pleased to share this public call for papers for the Eleventh New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) workshop, to be held at Brown University on Friday/Saturday, April 9/10, 2027. The workshop welcomes proposals relating to the past, present, and future of the Palestinian refugee camp as an idea, a space, a temporality, and a condition of life. Full review of the proposals begins on December 15, 2026.
The Theme
As the ever-burning candle of the Palestine question, refugee camps are more than a political symbol or a humanitarian site: they have come to stand in for the persistence of Palestinian forms of life in and against exile and enduring temporariness. The theme of “Refugee Camp” addresses the quintessential Palestinian condition of displacement, statelessness, vulnerability, and generational reproduction of everyday struggles for rebuilding lives and forging more dignified and just futures. As the world’s oldest and most permanently warehoused sites of the forcibly displaced, the Palestinian refugee camps are also constitutive of the post-Second World War international political and legal order, especially its histories of partitions, borders, and (im)mobilities in the region and globally.
The millions of forcibly displaced Palestinians share a common history and a common fate, but most Palestinian refugees have not directly experienced camp life. Only the poorest and most marginalized Palestinians live in the over fifty recognized camps, all of which are located inside or very near Palestine. For decades, these camps have been subjected to constant surveillance, military incursions and, in many cases, massacres and systematic destruction. The Genocide in Gaza, a refugee camp writ large, and the recent obliteration of the Jenin refugee camp are but the latest in a long list that includes, among many others, Tal al-Za`atar, Sabra and Shatila, and Yarmouk. At the same time, the very idea of the Palestinian refugee is facing political and legal erasure. Since the 1990s, the formal Palestinian political leadership has ignored the Palestinian diaspora, and the United States and Israel have led efforts to defund and shut down UNRWA, the key bridge linking refugees and refugee camps to international recognition and support. Although some camps have been sites of ethnographic and oral history projects, most remain the silenced and excluded shadow places of the shadow years, deepening an already deep sense of ambivalence, abandonment, and the need for self-reliance and self-protection.
Submitting a Proposal
This workshop invites interventions that center the camp and the refugee in thinking about Palestine and the Palestinians. We encourage proposals from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as from practitioners in fields such as law, architecture, public health, movement organizing, and the arts. Topics and themes include but are not limited to social histories, gender relations, and political economies of refugee camps and their relations to the Palestinian diaspora in general; political movements, armed struggle, and cultural mobilization; infrastructure, the built environment, and property relations; literature, representation, and media; memory, archives, and oral history; migration and mobility in local, regional, and international contexts; law and humanitarian interventions; and forms of resistance and rebuilding in the face of repeated destruction.
If you would like to present an original unpublished paper, please email a proposal of approximately 750 words along with a brief CV. Review of proposals will begin on December 15, 2026. Selected participants will be notified in mid-January, 2027 and asked to submit a draft of 4,000–7,000 words by March 14, 2027. Drafts will be confidentially circulated to paper presenters and panel chairs no later than two weeks before the workshop. All paper presenters are expected to give NDPS first right to publication.
About the NDPS Workshop
NDPS workshops are small, closed, and by invitation only. They have earned a reputation for frank, rigorous, and seminal discussions that consider the intellectual, ethical, and moral stakes of new research agendas in Palestinian Studies and the political spaces they open and foreclose. NDPS papers have been published as double-blind refereed articles in special issues of the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, among others. The “Refugee Camp” workshop fits within the larger theme of “Rebuilding Lives, Forging Futures” launched in 2025.
The workshop format facilitates intellectual exchange through pre-circulated papers, brief presentations, and extended panel discussions over two days. Senior and mid-career scholars usually chair panels and/or participate in discussions, while most presentation slots are reserved for early career scholars. Panels will be organized around themes that emerge from the papers.
Middle East Studies at Brown will reimburse paper presenters and discussants up to two nights lodging and up to three nights for international travelers. Reasonable travel expenses will be reimbursed against receipts following the conclusion of the workshop. For those traveling from abroad, reimbursement is possible only for those entering the United States on a Visa Waiver Business (VWB) or B-1 visa. Please note that participants would be responsible for obtaining their own visas.
Please direct any questions to palestinianstudiesconference@brown.edu
Sincerely,
Beshara Doumani, Professor of History and Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies
Nasser Abourahme, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies
Bowdoin College
Orwa Switat, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestinian Studies
Brown University