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Agency as temporally embedded in displacement: Syrian families renegotiating gender roles and relations in Lebanon
Abstract
This article investigates the temporal dimension of agency in displacement and how time is conceptualized and utilized in daily practice to renegotiate gender roles and gender relations among Syrian families in Lebanon. I argue that state and non-state actors in Lebanon pose a structural context that creates categories of inclusion and exclusion. For example, as Lebanon is a non-signatory state to the 1951 Refugee Convention, one can be recognized as a de facto refugee only if he/she is registered with the UN Refugee Agency. This and other structures posed by the Lebanese context define categories of belonging. However the boundaries of these categories are blurred, ephemeral, undefined, and strongly depend on the informality of the context. Consequently, Syrian families in Lebanon live in a state of limbo, suspended in time, in a state of “in-betweenness”. Based on these premises, and drawing upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Lebanon between 2017 and 2019, this study questions how Syrian families in Lebanon exercise agency in this context of temporal suspension, or liminality, and how gender roles and relationships are renegotiated in the space of displacement. My findings show that in performing gender roles and relationships in displacement, displaced Syrians were oriented towards habitual aspects, they imagined alternative possibilities, or they practically contextualized habits and projections. In this sense, their agency was temporally embedded and incorporated three different temporal elements: iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation of present circumstances. As a result, according to how people positioned themselves upon this temporal scale, they performed traditional or novel gender roles and relationships in the private and public sphere. The main contribution of this work is a theoretical one. By conceptualizing agency as temporally embedded it is possible to grasp a more in-depth perspective on how people reconstruct disrupted or transformed relationships as well as how they do gender and do family within the temporal (not only spatial) space of displacement. This study suggests that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of agency in the space of displacement and that the element of time should be used as a lens to investigate in-depth how people’s lives are impacted by the multiple dimensions of displacement.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Diaspora/Refugee Studies