Defending children's rights: Global discourse and local interpretations among Palestinian camp refugees in Jordan.
Item
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Title
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Defending children's rights: Global discourse and local interpretations among Palestinian camp refugees in Jordan.
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Identifier
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AAI3245069
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identifier
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3245069
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Creator
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Levine, Laure J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | Political Science, International Law and Relations
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Abstract
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This thesis examines local interpretations and effects of children's rights in Palestinian refugee camps in Amman, Jordan, where a large Palestinian refugee population has been waiting for a solution that would put an end to their hardship and would make them return to Palestine, their homeland.;The objectives of this thesis are: (1) to analyze how Western secular children's rights embodied in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or UN CRC, become articulated with local understandings of rights among a camp refugee community with cultural, religious, and political traditions; (2) to explore the impacts of the reformulated local discourse on camp children, adolescents and their families.;Fieldwork was conducted over a period of fourteen months (in 2000 and 2004) in the camps of Al-Wihdat and Jabal Nasser in Amman. I focused on activities of aid agencies, responses to them by educators, parents and refugee children, and on the views of each group regarding children's rights. A description of the camps and of family socialization practices in their historical context is presented in order to examine the complex relationship between politics, religion, culture and rights.;This thesis, based on a critique that the UN CRC and the proposition that its Western character is "universal", shows the reformulation of the children's rights discourse and ideology in local refugee cultural terms through the agency of educators, children and adolescents. By describing Palestinian camp refugee children and adolescents as participants in the social lives of their communities and as contributors to the making of their own culture, it is argued that the local interpretations of children's rights bear several contradictions. They are at the same time a source of ambivalence, and empowerment and hope for the Palestinian camp refugee community broken by over fifty years of exile.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
