Book Launch - Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC
Join the Department of International Development for the launch of Maren Larsen's book Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC.
About the Book
Worlding Home interrogates the social, spatial, and architectural lifeworlds of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers accommodated in contingent camps throughout Goma, the capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From 2017 to 2019, more than twenty of these camps existed in and around the city, operating as sites of global outreach even as they generated new ways of being at home for peacekeepers and the peace-kept population.
Through multisited ethnography and deep engagement with anthropological and urban theory, author Maren Larsen explores the entanglements of camp and city. Pushing against readings of Goma's peacekeeping camps as either more privileged enclaves or as outliers in camp studies when compared to refugee camps, Larsen argues for an understanding of "camp" as a process and practice. Between dwelling and journeying and "here" and "there," the everyday lives and embodied practices of Goma's peacekeepers and Congolese civilians co-construct a "city as elsewhere" in which camping is a vital urban practice.
By offering a more expansive understanding of how UN peacekeeping camps fit within Goma's urban fabric, Worlding Home reveals the intertwined sociospatial processes of making a home, building a city, and reimagining the world.
Reviews
"By considering the camp as a social and urban formation, Larsen's fine-grained ethnography offers a key reading for scholars interested in the complex geographies of encampment and urbanity in the context of global humanitarianism." ~Timothy Raeymaekers, author of The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean.
"This beautifully written book contributes to and challenges efforts to reformulate global urban studies through a lively, engaged ethnography of placemaking among Global South peacekeepers." ~Garth Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South.
About the speaker
Maren Larsen is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Basel. She coordinates the Masters program in Critical Urbanisms, chairs its Pedagogy Committee, and convenes core courses on interdisciplinary methods in urban research, theory in urban studies, emergency urbanism, and the settlement typology of the camp as an urban space. Her postdoctoral research project “Resettlement, Dwelling, and Urbanization in Secondary African Cities” (Forschungsfonds Nachwuchsforschende and Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft., 2023-2024) explores the lived experiences of people experiencing planned re-location projects linked to oil extraction and sea level rise in Tanga (Tanzania) and Saint-Louis (Senegal), respectively.
About the chair
Myfanwy James is an Assistant Professor in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies at LSE. Her work examines the politics of humanitarian intervention in contexts of conflict and displacement, with a regional focus on the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Using ethnographic and historical methods, she has conducted research on how humanitarians negotiate their access with armed groups, the experience of locally hired humanitarians in security management, structures of inequality in aid, as well as the contested legitimacy of medical research in epidemic contexts. Her work has been published in Third World Quarterly, Development and Change, Medical Anthropology, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Disasters, Social Science and Medicine, and Journal of Humanitarian Affairs.
Any questions?
You can contact us at intdev.comms@lse.ac.uk
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