Diasporic groups negotiate the transition from a physically (spatially) rooted national identity to an imagined national affiliation differently, contingent on the circumstances of their exile. Having been torn lose from their nation, refugees can nevertheless remain connected to their homelands, to their national identity, through certain practices: constant recollections of the past, passing down stories, and, increasingly through media. Such determination on the part of refugees allows for the challenging of Agamben’s (1998) notion of bare life, of lives not worth living. By arguing for the expansion of Agamben’s notion of “bare life” beyond bureaucratic and legal exclusions, my research demonstrates that young adult Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, although bureaucratically and officially excluded, avoid cultural and ideated “bare life” through a determination to stay connected and active remembrance of their pasts, of what unites them, of their history, homeland and national identity. The growth and widespread availability of global media has significantly facilitated the imaginative act critical to the sustenance of nationalism (and maintenance of national identity) among diasporic groups. Based on ethnographic research carried out among young adult refugees inside and outside the camps in Lebanon, I demonstrate how refugees’ recollections of Palestine, their determination to maintain connections to their country of origin, and their use of media to access news, stories and information about the homeland have served to reinforce a strong sense of who they are and where they came from. Such actions also serve to reinforce the temporality of their refugee status, to remind them that they belong to some place, and imagine that they are part of a national community. As concerns refugee camps specifically, Agamben’s bleak description of the camps as states of exception and his sweeping and unequivocal reduction of lives that exist in these spaces to “bare life” deny any room for change or accommodation on the part of those living in the camps. But, refugees have demonstrated that, in the face of such bureaucratic/legal abandonment or exclusion, a search for identity and construction of home in connection to a nationalist identity is even more essential. By remaining active in maintaining their sense of community and in reinforcing their nationalist identities, refugees do not necessarily succumb to “bare life.” Thus, the constraints of displacement are not entirely limiting; refugees continue to mediate their existence and their histories in connection to what they imagine as ‘home’.