Keywords

1 Introduction

This chapter focuses on how Syrian refugees navigate everyday relationships across transnational borders based on ethnographic research in Jordan with Syrian women and men. It seeks to deepen the understanding of the lived experiences of refugees, drawing attention to how they navigate the state of displacement.

Leading refugee scholar Dawn Chatty (2010) critiques how refugees are depicted by humanitarian agencies and government actors, noting that the word refugee has come to refer to people ‘without homelands, torn loose from their culture’, who are seen ‘as an aberration to the way the world was meant to be organized’ and who therefore need ‘therapeutic intervention’ (p. 37). Refugees are often linked to narratives about ‘crisis and danger’ (Nyers, 2006, p. 4). They are also positioned by humanitarian agencies as ‘subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions’ (Olivius, 2016, p. 270). This relationship between humanitarian actors and refugees is often informed by ‘an unequal relationship between the one giving aid and the one being aided’ (Fassin, 2012, p. 193), making the lives of refugees potentially subject to the decisions of humanitarian actors.

Despite the limits placed on them by the humanitarian system, refugees may still be mobile. Exploring the everyday mobilities of refugees thus sheds light on daily experiences of life during displacement. Hyndman (2004) writes: ‘Mobility is an outcome of various economic, geopolitical, gendered, and racialized relations and is constitutive of people’s locations as social and political subjects’ (p. 169). Mobility, in contrast to immobility, has positive connotations (Bissell, 2007, p. 278) and is linked to modernity (Cresswell, 2010, p. 19). Mobility shapes and is shaped by power relations (Hyndman, 2004, p. 170), making it particularly interesting to feminist scholars (Cresswell & Uteng, 2008) who seek to understand the gendered underpinnings of ‘whose bodies belong where’ (Silvey, 2006, p. 70). Women may, for example, be positioned as belonging at home while men are active agents who leave the safety of home (Sheller, 2008, p. 258). Indeed, masculinity and mobility are often linked, which is evidenced by the perceived security threat presented by refugees on the move (Hyndman & Giles, 2011, p. 363). Mobility must be acceptable and apolitical to be a non-threat, otherwise these threats are best kept waiting ‘in place’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 55).

As well as being tied to space, mobility is also connected to time (Peteet, 2017, p. 127). The analysis of time within refugee literature has often focused on ‘waiting’ given the nature of protracted refugee crises (Hyndman & Giles, 2011, pp. 361–363; Peteet, 2017, p. 177). Waiting is said to be key to the subaltern experience (Bayart, 2007, pp. 272–274), an indicator of having less power: those who wait are classified as lacking because of their position within hierarchies such as race, class and gender (Bourdieu, 2000; Schweizer, 2016). In contrast, those who force others to wait exercise power through ‘adjourning, deferring, delaying, raising false hopes, or, conversely, rushing, taking by surprise’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 228). Peteet (2017) notes that making refugees wait ‘infantilizes and subjugates’, reinforcing the fact that their time is less important and that the spaces they occupy do not belong to them (p. 177). During periods of waiting, there may be a sense that time is in surplus and needs to be used up, which Jeffrey (2010) refers to as ‘timepass’ (p. 471). Waiting, which is often framed in opposition to mobility, is often gendered feminine because of the precarity and vulnerability it is seen to represent (Hyndman & Giles, 2011). However, time continues to proceed even during the waiting of displacement (Brun, 2015, p. 34). The act of waiting itself may allow refugees to remain hopeful and even become active subjects (Brun, 2015, p. 33; Manjikian, 2010, pp. 53–55). This expands the idea of waiting beyond the dominant representation of being in ‘limbo’ (Kits, 2005) towards the idea that waiting may also represent a ‘liminal’ space (Brun & Fábos, 2015, p. 10) for new relationships and solidarity (Turner, 1964) and the use of new strategies (Brun, 2003, p. 32).

The nature of social connections during displacement has long been a topic of interest to scholars. Transnational research explores how populations on the move create and sustain social relations across international borders (Glick Schiller et al., 1995, p. 48), demonstrating that concepts like family belonging and caregiving are not localized practices but may take different forms in the context of migration and displacement (Baldassar & Merla, 2014; Marlowe, 2017). Transnational research has often focused on transnational relationships in the context of permanent resettlement (Ager & Strang, 2008; Marlowe, 2017). However, there is a growing focus on relationships and social networks during displacement in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis (Achilli, 2016; Sharif, 2018). Some research, including analyses by humanitarian agencies, tends to overemphasize the collapse of social relations among Syrians during displacement (Stevens, 2016; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2014). It is also important to note that scholarly research on transnational migration has been critiqued for being blind to gendered power hierarchies that affect people’s negotiations of ‘home’ (Al-Ali & Koser, 2001, p. 5; Pessar & Mahler, 2003, p. 812). Women may feel the impacts of lost support networks as they bear the primary burden of caregiving for children while away from home (Al-Ali, 2002, pp. 253–254). Gender norms may be both reinforced and challenged across transnational spaces, which at times lead people to seek the relations associated with home and at times offer new opportunities for gender norms to be contested (Pessar & Mahler, 2003, p. 819).

This chapter focuses on family dynamics and relationships among Syrian refugees. Since the beginning of the ‘Syria Crisis’ in early 2011, some 5.6 million Syrians have been registered as refugees in the surrounding countries of Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, with the largest numbers of refugees hosted regionally within Turkey (66%), Lebanon (15%) and Jordan (12%) (UNHCR, n.d.). At the regional level, around 92% of registered refugees are self-settled, living in urban areas and informal settlements, while the remainder are in refugee camps within these host countries. In Jordan there are currently over 665,000 registered Syrian refugees, 80% of whom are self-settled, living in communities among Jordanians, Palestinians and other groups (UNHCR, n.d.).

This chapter explores the everyday experiences of self-settled Syrian refugees living in Jordan, recognizing that even routine and mundane experiences, such as maintaining relationships, completing administrative processes and being ‘mobile’ or ‘immobile’, sheds light on the power hierarchies and gender norms refugees are subject to (Marlowe, 2017, p. 2). It examines how Syrian refugees navigate displacement and how they find their ‘place’ (Hammond, 2004) even during a state of flux. The section that follows outlines my research methods. The findings are then divided into three key themes: gendered family dynamics, transnational waiting for bureaucracies and gendered mobilities.

2 Methods and Data

This chapter is based on anthropological fieldwork carried out in Jordan over a nine-month period from September 2016 to May 2017. This fieldwork was part of a doctoral research project which sought to unravel humanitarian narratives on gender norms among Syrian refugees, exploring (im)mobilities, social relationships and gender. My research was conducted with self-settled Syrian refugees living in the areas of Zarqa, Irbid, Jerash and Amman. These refugees were aged 18–60 and were largely from Dar’a, Damascus and Homs in Syria. I also conducted interviews with local and international humanitarian agency staff who were currently working in Jordan or had previously worked in Jordan.

In Jordan, Syrians have been continually interviewed by humanitarian agencies, journalists and donors, and many may have experienced research fatigue. As such, my research methods were designed to challenge more traditional academic and humanitarian agency methods of knowledge production. To enable this, I used a feminist research approach. Letherby (2003) emphasizes that the imperative of feminist research is ‘to produce useful knowledge that will make a difference to women’s lives’ (p. 4). In her book on sensitive research methods, Liamputtong (2007) asserts that feminist research requires the use of multiple methods that are flexible and participatory (p. 13). Methods themselves can reduce gaps between the researcher and participants (Rodgers, 2004). I used a range of methods, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and life stories, alongside approaches that allow participants a greater role in constructing knowledge, specifically focus group discussions (FGDs) and participatory photography. These methods are flexible, leave room for creativity and hopefully helped to reduce the extractive nature of the research. However, power hierarchies may still be present even when using more participatory methods like FGDs (Smithson, 2008, p. 363), due to the power dynamic between the researcher and participants.

For me, taking a feminist approach to research meant not behaving like a detective whose sole purpose is to ‘ferret out “the facts”’ (Malkki, 1995, p. 51). During fieldwork, I spent time building relationships of trust through sharing food and information about my own life and discussing issues important to participants beyond the scope of my own research. As part of trying to implement feminist research, my interactions with Syrian women and men were informed by the idea of reciprocity ̶ of ‘giving something back’ to participants (Liamputtong, 2007, p. 60). I sought to uphold the principle of reciprocity through the friendships that were formed, in how I responded to the research participants’ generosity and hospitality, and in my efforts to obtain information or assistance from humanitarian agencies.

The research began with participatory photography workshops that incorporated FGDs. Participants discussed their daily life in Syria and Jordan, using photographs they had taken to help to describe their experiences. Refugees who attended the photography workshops were invited to participate in semi-structured or life story interviews. I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with Syrian women and men, as well as 10 semi-structured interviews with international and local humanitarian workers. The interviews were used to triangulate FGD and life story data. To address power inequalities, I used open-ended questions and gave participants the opportunity to ask me questions (Nusair, 2013, p. 66). During the interviews, I asked follow-up questions and used verbal and non-verbal methods to probe the responses of participants. In a few cases, participants who were friends or relatives were interviewed together.

I also conducted 10 life story interviews with Syrian men and women. Life stories are distinct from other interview methods in that they require multiple prolonged sessions (Leavy, 2006, p. 154) to provide wider social context to the experiences of individuals (McLeod & Thomson, 2009, p. 41). Across multiple sessions, in homes, cafés and parks, I asked refugees to share their life stories with reference to the following periods in their lives: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, leaving Syria and life in Jordan. I began the discussion by asking ‘What did it mean to be a girl/boy growing up in Syria? Can you tell me about your childhood?’ I used a similar question structure to invite narratives about later life stages.

Participant observation was also carried out within local humanitarian agencies, in cafés and at markets. I focused on key spaces where I had access, particularly humanitarian agency spaces, the homes of refugees and cafés. I paid attention to people’s tasks, the tone of voice people used, how people reacted to each other, facial expressions, and the way people spent their time. I took detailed notes on what I observed and was careful not to interfere with any activities (Angrosino, 2005, p. 730), although my presence itself likely affected people’s activities and interactions.

The research was conducted with translation assistance from two research assistants. I also had support in transcribing the interview recordings into English. We retained the phrasing, flow and grammar used by participants, even if it did not result in a perfect English translation as part of a feminist commitment to letting participants speak for themselves and avoiding acting as mediator of their narratives. The transcripts were analysed alongside my fieldnotes, which included detailed reflections made during the fieldwork process. Within ethnographic research, the researcher’s personal experiences may be part of the data that is analysed (Davis & Craven, 2016, p. 81). Taking a feminist approach extends to data analysis, including decisions about which narratives to include and exclude (Buch & Staller, 2006, p. 215). Throughout the analysis, participants’ experiences were positioned as the starting point, instead of the data being used to prove a hypothesis. The data was analysed and coded thematically using Nvivo. In the accounts in the sections below, identifying information has been removed and all participant names are pseudonyms.

3 Gendered Family Dynamics

Power dynamics within families may affect the decisions made by Syrians when they assess the viability of remaining in Jordan or seeking refuge elsewhere. Issues of family dynamics arose most strikingly in the accounts of Dina, a young married woman who lived in Homs with her husband and children before the war. After some time in Jordan, her husband decided to seek refuge in Europe with their oldest son, age 9. Dina explained the context of this decision, which she attributes to the jealousy of her mother-in-law:

Frankly, the person who advised us to travel was my mother-in-law! [Laughing, making a dancing movement to imitate her mother-in-law.] She was the one who told him, and she told him to take a child with him.

According to Dina, her mother-in-law’s suggestion that her husband and son leave for Europe was sparked by malice and jealousy, which she has felt from her mother-in-law since she married. Dina viewed her husband as vulnerable to the suggestions and inclinations of his mother and his sisters, sharing examples of how they banded together to make life difficult for her. Here, gendered family dynamics influenced her husband’s departure and provides the context within which Dina now struggles for reunification within the humanitarian bureaucracy, as discussed in the next section.

Family dynamics may also be protective. Dina, for example, said that at one point her husband even suggested they should not continue with their reunification efforts: ‘He told me, “Maybe it’s better if you didn’t come.” But of course, he… he says that just to console himself.’

Protective family dynamics also arose in the case of Khadija, an older widow who lives in Zarqa with one adult son while some of her other adult children and relatives remain in Syria. Khadija shields her children from knowing that she is doing well or even that she has cooked a favourite Syrian dish, kuba. In her role as mother, which transgresses geographical boundaries, Khadija decided it was better not to add to the suffering of her children with demonstrations of how her life was better in Jordan. In this example, hiding information had a protective function.

The decision to seek alternative solutions to indefinite displacement in Jordan is not easy. Yasmeen and Ibrahim, whose two oldest sons are now in Europe while they remain in Jordan with their younger children, have been left questioning the decision they made to stay:

  • Yasmeen: They told us the future there for their children is better.

  • [Ibrahim exhales deeply].

  • Research assistant: Is there no reunification?

  • Yasmeen: Inshallah. The procedure is very, very bad. There is, but one has to wait.

  • Ibrahim: I sent them, and I wish I didn’t send them.

  • Yasmeen: Don’t say such a thing. It’s their naṣīb [fate, luck or destiny]. But everyone advised us it’s good to send them because there they have a future. This is their naṣīb, don’t say that. Whatever will happen is already written. They say, whatever will happen to a person and how long one will live is already written.

The concept of naṣīb refers to fate, luck or destiny – the idea that whatever happens has been ‘written’ by God and therefore cannot be changed. Here, the notion of fate was used to justify Yasmeen and Ibrahim’s decision and soften their regret. In a separate interview with Yasmeen, she explained the sadness of her eldest son leaving: ‘I feel like when my son travelled, it broke my back, as they say. I mean, not the war in Syria, not leaving our homes, leaving our families, but my son leaving, I found hardest of all.’ Yasmeen and Ibrahim talk to their sons on the phone every day. They also discussed others’ decisions to go or not go:

  • Yasmeen: I know Syrian people who left their children behind! This woman has four children. They are 13 and younger.

  • Research assistant: Did she leave them behind?

  • Yasmeen: Yes. She has a relative who lived across from them who will look after them. She has a child who is three years old, like younger than my little one. Honestly, the way we Syrians think is not complete. There is something missing in our thinking.

  • Ibrahim: Because of the circumstances of war we have been through, we didn’t know right from wrong anymore. We consult with my wife’s family and mine. We want to learn their opinion. We like to consult the people who are older than us. We are old, but we still need the ones who are older than us.

In this account, Yasmeen and Ibrahim imply judgement of the actions taken by others. Yasmeen’s tone suggested that for a mother to leave her children behind was shocking, and she and Ibrahim attribute this decision to the effects of displacement on Syrians. At one point, Yasmeen and Ibrahim considered travelling to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage to Mecca, but decided against it:

  • Yasmeen: Imagine us then, one part of the family is in [Europe], another in Saudi and in Jordan. If that happens, I will officially go crazy! [Laughing] There are people who are leaving without getting the approval, but praised be Allah, they can make it back into the country.

  • Ibrahim: That’s right.

  • Yasmeen: No, that is a risk! No way, we don’t have any luck to begin with! […] We don’t have the naṣīb to see the house of Allah. All my sisters have done Umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca], apart from me. They went with my parents.

Naṣīb was intertwined with narratives about decision-making even for shorter-term trips like the pilgrimage to Mecca. Yasmeen and Ibrahim were interviewed for resettlement to the United States, but the fact that their sons were in Europe affected their resettlement: ‘But when I told them my two oldest sons are not with me, they asked me, “Where are they?” I told them they went to [Europe]. […] They rejected us.’ This may compound the regret they feel at sending their sons to Europe; this decision has resulted in the loss of other opportunities to leave Jordan, and in a longer period of waiting in Jordan.

The accounts above highlight that while mobility may be desired (Bissell, 2007, p. 278), it may also carry judgements depending on who is mobile. For Khadija, being able to leave Syria caused her to feel guilt as the matriarch of the family during her displacement in Jordan, which resulted in her hiding information from her children. Yasmeen and Ibrahim blame themselves for their sons being in Europe and feel guilt for causing their mobility. However, when a mother left her young children behind, Yasmeen and Ibrahim’s judgement carried particular gendered implications. While Yasmeen and Ibrahim state that not knowing right from wrong is a consequence of war, there is a judgement implied towards a woman who moved across borders without her children, stepping outside the bounds of expected behaviour for a mother. Her mobility across borders challenges expectations of where women belong: in the home (Sheller, 2008, p. 258).

4 Transnational Waiting for Bureaucracies

My experience conducting field research with refugees in Jordan illustrated the complex hierarchies refugees are situated within. As part of conducting feminist research, I sought to live out the principles of reciprocity, reflexivity and addressing power hierarchies within the research process. Acting on the basis of reciprocity meant at times taking people’s UNHCR registration information and making phone calls to find out about access to services, eligibility for cash assistance and the status of resettlement processes. The last was perhaps the most challenging to obtain information on, and I found myself frustrated at the complex bureaucratic processes that meant refugees had little information beyond the fact that their claims were being processed and they would be informed of updates. Refugees did not always know that this process may take months or even years.

During the participatory photography workshops I organized, participants were encouraged to share existing photographs and talk about their lives in Syria and Jordan. They also discussed their favourite and least favourite places in Jordan as part of an activity that involved taking photos of some of these spaces. At times, these least favourite places could not safely be photographed. For example, police buildings or the UNHCR office were commonly mentioned as least favourite places, but we decided they could not be photographed. In the case of the UNHCR office, it was the time and bureaucratic processes associated with the space that made people dislike it: ‘[Y]ou go out at six [...] you come back at two in the afternoon or three in the afternoon, if you were lucky.’ Another woman added, ‘There is no place to sit, and the sun is strong above you. If you begged the employee, he let you in. If you did not beg the employee, you will stay standing outside.’ In a women’s FGD during the photography workshop, a few women described the invasive process of being physically searched before being allowed to enter the UNHCR office. One woman suggested the searches take place because ‘they [UNHCR] are afraid of something’.

The challenges Syrians face while waiting are not limited to queues at the UNHCR office, but may extend to any kind of waiting required within a humanitarian bureaucracy. For Dina, waiting was required because she and her husband did not have the documentation they needed for reunification. When her family left Syria, they did not anticipate being gone for long. Shortly after they left, however, their house was bombed, destroying the documents they had left behind. Receiving copies of documents from government authorities was a significant challenge: ‘[I]n our area, in Homs, you can’t get a marriage certificate and accreditation of papers unless you know someone very well to issue those for you.’ Dina explained that her family went through a difficult process of paying third parties to acquire documents that proved she and her husband were married. One person took their money and disappeared with the documents, delaying the process further. Dina also described the challenges she faced when dealing with a European embassy in Jordan about their reunification claim. One female government official acted ‘as if she wanted to finish with us quickly, and as if I was there to disturb her or take something from her.’ When Dina explained their situation, the embassy official repeatedly asked, ‘Have you finished? Is there still more?’ On another occasion, Dina realized her statements were not being correctly translated by the Arabic translator provided by the embassy.

While Dina tried to negotiate with people in Syria for her documents, her husband was facing challenges in Europe, illustrating waiting at a transnational level. Dina explained that it was challenging for her husband to find a lawyer who could help with reunification: ‘[H]e would find a lawyer but they would tell him, for instance, “No, we work on residency issues.”’ Her husband was ‘like a blind and deaf person’, forced to grapple with bureaucracy while uncertain of the process and unable to speak the language. The pressures on her husband extended across international borders to Dina:

And me from here, I felt fire here [pointing to her heart]. I’m feeling like I’m on fire! Yaʿnī [it means]… yaʿnī, a little more of this and my husband will explode from frustration there and I will explode here… Because this is the situation, that’s it. So now you have to wait for what people tell you to do.

Waiting was a transnational experience for Dina and her husband, such that obstacles and challenges he experienced in Europe were also felt by Dina in Jordan. Both husband and wife were subject to the decisions and timing of others. This is disempowering in the best of circumstances, let alone when a family is separated. Like Yasmeen and Ibrahim, Dina and her husband attribute these circumstances to fate:

He said, ‘I don’t have naṣīb. I don’t have any luck, not with my siblings, my friends or with the people I know!’ Yes, he doesn’t have any luck. Yaʿnī, even our application at the embassy – we don’t have any luck with it.

Blaming fate may be a coping mechanism, a way of shielding or protecting refugees from the prospect that they exist within complex, unfair structures.

The accounts above demonstrate the challenges refugees face while waiting for bureaucracies. While waiting at the UNHCR office, refugees are subject to the decisions of UNHCR staff, who hold the power, echoing Peteet’s (2017) reflections that making refugees wait treats them as if they are children (p. 177). In this example, the bodies of refugees, even those of women, were viewed as a security threat. The examples from Dina and her husband draw out the complexity associated with transnational waiting. For them, naṣīb was an everyday coping strategy, a way of making sense of delays and the apparent maze of humanitarian bureaucracies. Attributing a situation to fate might mean that the everyday becomes more manageable. For Dina and her husband, waiting reinforced their positions as subaltern within their respective contexts (Bayart, 2007, pp. 272–274). However, the many obstacles they faced did not stop Dina and her husband from continuing to try to be reunified. They were not passively waiting, but were indeed active agents who tried to change their situation (Brun, 2015, p. 33; Manjikian, 2010, pp. 53–55).

5 Gendered Mobilities?

Syrian refugees’ everyday experiences of mobility in Jordan, as described by the men and women who participated in FGDs and interviews, are a useful way of understanding the lives of refugees during displacement. While Syrian men in Jordan had both opportunities and pressure to find work, women talked about being bored and having nothing to do. Some mentioned they had no one to visit in Jordan, while for others, visiting family and friends in Jordan was very important. One woman described the enjoyment she felt when visiting neighbours and having them visit her: ‘They are good women. I enjoy myself when I visit them. They are loving!’ Another described visiting her friend’s Palestinian-Jordanian mother, who then visited her in return. One young Syrian woman had made new Jordanian friends who would visit her at home. They also exchanged gifts and went on trips together. In this way, although immobile in the sense of being at home and waiting during displacement, women maintained cross-national friendships through visiting each other.

Although women’s (im)mobilities are sometimes attributed solely to gendered power hierarchies, when Syrian women talked about where they go and how they spend their time, the reasons were rarely gendered. For example, for many refugees, cost was a barrier to mobility in Jordan. One woman summarized it thus: ‘Going out costs [money].’ The expense of public transportation or a taxi is often too high to justify, and therefore ‘to stay at home is better’. When disposable income is limited, going out may be viewed as an unnecessary expense. Alongside cost, the hilly terrain of Jordan was mentioned by many female research participants as an obstacle to walking outdoors. Women explained that in Syria, the landscape is predominantly flat, making walking to visit friends or relatives easier. They felt that Jordan’s terrain made walking exhausting. One woman complained, ‘You feel your heart will stop.’ Interestingly it was largely women who reflected on the difficulties of walking in Jordan. This may be linked to ‘an ideology which encourages women to be physically frail, or to think that they are’ (Ardener, 1981, p. 28).

In other cases, mobility was limited by not knowing others. Some Syrians said that their social interactions were often limited to family members, while others said they also had relationships with neighbours in Jordan. Unfamiliarity with the new location and new people was a barrier to engaging with Jordanians. This perhaps explains one comment from an interview participant in Amman when I asked if she liked the café we were meeting in. She said, ‘I only go to the places you take me to.’ Similarly, when participants in an FGD were asked about where they go during the week, one woman laughed, saying, ‘We haven’t seen anything. We leave our house, come here and from here go to our house. There’s nothing else, nothing at all.’

Women’s mobility may also shift during displacement compared to before the war. One man explained that in Jordan, his wife has started to go out more than she did in Syria. Many of these excursions are accompanied: ‘Her children are all grown up, you know, so she takes her son and goes out!’ For him, this shift has been amusing. He laughed as he told the story of how his wife wanted him to travel to Ramtha with her. He told her, ‘You go, and take your son! Am I going to spend all my time with you? Enough! [...] It’s OK, go. Your children are grown up now. They are men. Go with them!’ On another occasion, when his wife wanted him to accompany her on a shopping trip, he told her, ‘Go out to the street, watch for the bus that has the name of the village on it, hop on it and go!’ The journey turned out well for his wife. This man seemed to contradict common humanitarian agency narratives about men being afraid for the safety of their wives and therefore restricting their movement in Jordan (Regional Syria Response Hub, 2015; Women’s Refugee Commission, 2014). He said, ‘I want her to become more independent.’ This account is contextualized, however, by the fact that he and his family live in Irbid, which historically had close ties to the border area of Dar’a in Syria. His siblings married Jordanians, and Jordan is not an unfamiliar place for him. Therefore, his comfort with the physical environment may explain his attitude to his wife’s mobility.

Mobilities also require contextualization across time. Cresswell (2010) suggests that ‘new mobilities’ need to be understood in the context of ‘old mobilities’ (p. 29). Experiences of mobility or immobility do not occur in a vacuum but are shaped by the past. One young woman living in Amman explained that during her childhood, her family moved constantly due to her father’s work. These experiences led to her family being isolated from their extended family and friends, but also prepared them for their subsequent experience of displacement to Jordan: ‘Maybe if I did not have that experience of continuously moving in Syria, maybe I would be affected more. […] The moving in Syria and changing places served me. So here I didn’t suffer as much, and I adjusted.’ Similarly, a woman who moved to another governorate to pursue university studies before the war felt that this first mobility, although uncomfortable, helped her to be more responsible and independent. Mobility across governorates or international borders may have been a pre-existing experience for some Syrians. Alongside the practice of family members working in the Gulf, some Syrians also experienced forced displacement from the Golan Heights during the war with Israel or internal migration which was implemented by the Assad regimes in various governorates of Syria prior to the conflict. These experiences of being uprooted and resettled by the state may have prepared some Syrians for their displacement in Jordan and other countries.

Everyday mobilities have also taken new forms during displacement through the use of social media. During FGDs and interviews, Syrian women and men drew attention to their use of social media in Jordan, which was something that none of the participants mentioned when discussing how they formerly spent their time in Syria. One group of men of varying ages said the first thing they do in the morning is check Facebook. One woman talked about making WhatsApp calls to multiple countries each day to speak with her children, siblings and parents. In each location where I conducted photography workshops, WhatsApp groups were established to communicate with the participants. These proved to be vibrant, active spaces for engagement; on multiple occasions I woke up to find 50–100 new WhatsApp messages from participants, including emoticons, questions about the services provided by humanitarian agencies, memes containing encouraging or religious statements, and, most common of all, messages just saying ‘hi’. These mediums have been recognized as important for enabling connections with relatives and friends in different countries (Twigt, 2018, p. 5; Wall et al., 2017, p. 242).

Through social media, refugees who are physically immobile can maintain relationships across national borders (Twigt, 2018, p. 5), building and sustaining virtual communities through WhatsApp groups, Facebook messages and calls to loved ones, and sharing important information. Waltorp (2013) suggests that social media platforms offer ‘a specific form of constructed space’ (p. 562) where ‘place’ can exist in a ‘non-place’ (p. 565). Similarly, Aouragh (2011) suggests that social media can be seen as ‘almost an embodied experience, the hands and fingers touching the screen, the tears and smiles wrapping the faces, and the voices and noises transmitted’ (p. 383). Thus, ‘virtual mobility’ can become a substitute for physical mobility (Aouragh, 2011, p. 392). For women who otherwise feel unable to leave the home, engaging in these virtual spaces can be empowering (Waltorp, 2013, p. 557); conversely, they may create further opportunities for freedom to be limited (p. 566), as was the case for one woman who was experiencing intimate partner violence. She disclosed that her husband restricts access to her phone and removes WhatsApp from it, preventing her from making social connections in response to her perceived misbehaviour. The everyday mobilities enabled by mobile devices may be limited or expanded by gender inequalities in the home.

6 Conclusion

This chapter uses feminist, ethnographic approaches to contribute to knowledge on transnational family dynamics, gender, waiting and mobilities, presenting detailed accounts of Syrian women and men living in Jordan.

The findings from this research elucidate how Syrian refugees are positioned within power hierarchies that may cause them to be subject to the decisions of those in positions of power (Bayart, 2007, pp. 272–274), drawing attention to everyday practices during periods of waiting. These practices include dealing with family dynamics and coping with feelings of regret, guilt and jealousy. The findings show that power dynamics within families may affect decision-making about the future or result in concealing information to protect other family members. Power dynamics are not fixed, however, nor do they consign refugees to abject powerlessness. This research highlights that refugees may remain active even during the waiting of protracted displacement, making decisions about their future or seeking to change their present circumstances (Brun, 2015, p. 33; Manjikian, 2010, pp. 53–55).

During periods of waiting, refugees may invoke particular coping strategies (see also Chap. 10). This chapter explores naṣīb as a coping strategy that may shield refugees from the reality of the power hierarchies that shape their daily experiences. Naṣīb is infused into refugee narratives and represents how Syrians make sense of life choices. This research builds on existing work on waiting among refugees (Hyndman & Giles, 2011; Peteet, 2017), demonstrating how naṣīb may be utilized to help refugees navigate everyday processes of waiting for bureaucracies.

This research also details the experiences Syrians face in navigating social and physical spaces in Jordan, including the context-dependent nature of mobilities, which may not necessarily always involve a gendered dimension. While mobility may appear to be the optimal condition (Bissell, 2007, p. 278), mobility may nonetheless result in gendered judgements towards women who transgress expected mobilities by moving across borders (Sheller, 2008, p. 258). This chapter also builds on existing research (Waltorp, 2013) to highlight that although Syrians may experience physical constraints to mobility, mobile phones offer opportunities for both sustaining and controlling relationships (Waltorp, 2013, p. 566).

This chapter contributes to deepening the understanding of the diverse experiences of Syrian refugees. It presents a rich picture of family life and relationships to enable academics and policymakers to better understand the challenges and nuances of refugees’ everyday experiences during displacement.