Professor Allan’s work as an anthropologist, ethnographic filmmaker, and critical media activist in the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon is intrinsically interdisciplinary. The main thrust of her research has been to examine the collapse of Palestinian nationalist politics in exile. Her recent ethnography, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford UP, 2014), won the 2014 Palestine Book Award, and the Middle East Studies Book Award at the 2015 American Anthropological Association meeting. The work, which draws on more than a decade of research in Beirut’s Shatila camp, explores the material realities of camp life; the impact of humanitarian aid and international solidarity networks; the everyday survival strategies sustaining and reconstituting the social and political fabric of the community; and emergent forms of self-determination outside the nation-state.
How refugees express grievances, contest economic exclusion, and demand civic entitlements even in the absence of citizenship, reveal new forms of agency and activism that often traverse ethnic and sectarian divides and do not fit prevailing models for Palestinian political subjectivity in this context. Her current research on the socioeconomic networks connecting marginalized Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese in Lebanon’s informal economy, builds on these concerns to explore how economic practices among the urban poor unsettle and contest established structures of legal and political exclusion.
Professor Allan is also the founder of the Nakba Archive, a grassroots, video oral history archive, that has recorded over 500 testimonies with first generation Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon about the 1948 displacement. This collection is now housed at the American University in Beirut, and is the subject of another research project she is developing, provisionally entitled “Genealogies of Palestinian Exile: Refugee narratives of 1948,” which will examine the cultural and historical significance of this oral histories, and more broadly the politics of Palestinian memory and archive.
