Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (New Texts Out Now)

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Jan 27, 2025 Turkey
Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (New Texts Out Now)

Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (New Texts Out Now)

By : Özge Yaka

Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (University of California Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Özge Yaka (OY): After focusing on state theory and political economy in my formative academic years, including my PhD, I needed a change of orientation. I wanted to spend my remaining intellectual energy understanding and analyzing social movements that are challenging the hegemony I had been working on for a long time.

Environmental movements in general and the anti-HEPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) movement in particular derived my interest for two main reasons. The first reason was that environmental movements were one of the few popular and effective movements (together with the feminist movement) in the increasingly authoritarian and repressive political environment of Turkey. I was also sensing the central importance of grassroots environmental movements not only against the “bulldozer capitalism” (see Erdem Evren’s Bulldozer Capitalism) that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was promoting with endless (and endlessly destructive) energy and construction projects—but also globally in the face of the ecological crisis the extractive-neoliberal capitalism accelerates (and hence, is unable to produce effective responses). This was my Marxist political economist self, making politically strategic research decisions. 

What had opened new horizons for me and forced me to write this book though was my curiosity toward the motivations of people—not of movement activists and professionals, the usual suspects that I closely associate with—but the “real people”, the villagers who are resisting HEPPs so effectively, especially the peasant women who are at the forefront of the struggle. I was truly curious about their reasons, determination, and commitment that empowers them to resist not only the private companies but also the state and its repressive apparatus. 

This second reason made me conduct extensive ethnographic research, something that I have not done before, in many villages and valleys in three different regions of Turkey in which the HEPPs are concentrated. In the end, what I observed in the Black Sea Region, especially my conversations with women, made me write this book. Why? Because as far as I was concerned, their voices—their narratives, their motivations to resist HEPPs and protect their rivers—were not heard in the ever-growing literature on environmental movements and environmental justice within political ecology, human geography, anthropology, or sociology. So, I had to come up with a way to make them heard, which took the shape of developing a novel body-centered, phenomenological approach that relates women’s everyday sensory-effective connections to rivers (and to non-human entities and environments in general) and their political agency. Establishing this relation, I conceptually engaged with the body, as well as emotions, memory, and place.
Non-human entities and environments are not only resources for us—we live with them, interact with them, and feel our “flesh” only in connection with them.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

OY: This book is about the resistance of Black Sea women against HEPPs in Turkey. But it is also about the environmental struggles of our age in general, and about what they reveal in terms of our more-than-human existence. 

It argues, very briefly, that grassroots environmental struggles cannot be reduced to purely economic motivations (sustaining livelihoods) or cultural and political contexts (struggles for political autonomy and sovereignty and/or secrecy, cosmology, and religious belief). These are, of course, powerful motivations for many struggles around the globe. I also observe these motivations in Turkey’s Mediterranean region (where subsistence agriculture is dependent on irrigation and hence river waters are instrumental for sustaining livelihoods) and the Kurdish region (where the struggle against HEPPs is embedded in the broader struggle for Kurdish autonomy), respectively. But this is not the whole story. That is why I focused on the Black Sea case—to demonstrate that our everyday, bodily, sensory, and affective connections with the non-human world function as media of political agency. This phenomenological connection, which is largely invisible, is the basis for our relationship with the place, engenders body memory, and conditions what we call selfhood and identity. What makes this largely ignored, flattened-out connection suddenly visible, and even vital, is the threat of environmental dispossession. In the face of such a threat, the routine becomes visible, the mundane becomes special—and the rivers become an urgent cause, so urgent that one puts her life on the line for it. In a way the threat of losing the rivers forces what Husserl called “phenomenological reduction”—the method of bracketing our positive knowledge and representations to return to the description of our lived experience.

I know that phenomenology is not normally the way to go if you study environmental movements and resistance. And I did not do it because I was a phenomenologist, or this was my chosen methodological standpoint when I started—not at all. I was neither familiar with phenomenology nor with the work of Merleau-Ponty and feminist phenomenologists who build on him. The whole framework emerged very slowly, and painstakingly, in relation to the empirical data. It was my conversations with the East Black Sea women, their stories and narratives, that forced me to engage with the literature on the body, and I arrived at Merleau-Ponty and contemporary feminist and eco-phenomenology through corporeal feminism. Grounded theorists would be proud. As a result, the book turned out to be a truly transdisciplinary venture that builds on and thinks with various fields and disciplines such as feminist theory, political ecology, social movement studies, critical geography, environmental humanities, affect studies, memory studies, actor-network theory, new materialism, posthumanism, phenomenology of body and water, theories of justice and environmental justice, indigenous studies, and Turkish studies, to name a few.  

I went in such a conceptual direction because the field had taught me that we cannot grasp the core of the grassroots environmental struggles of our age—which are, in my opinion, struggles for more-than-human coexistence—without grasping the ecological embeddedness of our social existence and the more-than-human character of our lifeworld (of our everyday lived experiences, practices and encounters). Non-human entities and environments are not only resources for us—we live with them, interact with them, and feel our “flesh” only in connection with them. They are central to our social existence and place-based lifeworld. This idea of a more-than-human lifeworld stands at the core of the notion of socio-ecological justice that I develop towards the end of the book. By introducing this notion, I aim to intervene in the environmental justice literature by framing human-non-human relationality as a matter of justice. In other words, environmental justice is not only about the just distribution of environmental goods and bads or about the recognition of certain cultures and identities—it is also about the ethics of coexistence and the relational nature of the social and ecological realms (as many Indigenous communities and struggles around the world have been teaching us).

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

OY: It could be seen as a radical rupture if you consider my PhD thesis and first publications as my previous work. I remember sending a picture of my work desk in Paris to my boyfriend, who lived in Berlin. On my desk, you could see Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, and Rosi Braidotti’s Patterns of Dissonance. I added a note asking, “There was an orthodox Marxist doing political economy, what happened to her?”. He responded, “Old Karl keeping guard while simultaneously getting his beard queered,” in reference to the framed Karl Marx portrait with a glittery beard on my desk.

This research indeed transformed me drastically. My methodological perspective, conceptual orientation, and even my discipline have changed. I started as a Marxist political economist with a PhD in Sociology and ended up as a feminist geographer who works with phenomenology! But still, some things have not changed like the old Karl keeping guard. In the first chapter of my book, I analyze the political-economic (and political-ecologic) context in which the anti-HEPP struggles flourish. And I think this analysis is essential even when you mainly discuss the relationship between somatic experience and political agency. So, the basis is there, I just went on to build something else on it. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

OY: Scholars of political ecology, environmental humanities, and phenomenology. But also social scientists in general. And feminists. And, maybe even more importantly, students. Activist-minded young people who are interested in understanding and analyzing the world we live in and in the struggles that aim to change it.

The impact I would like the book to have is twofold. On the one hand, I want it to act as a vehicle to amplify the voices of the women I talked to. I want people to know about them, their grievances, their struggle, and their individual and collective stories. And also their more-than-human lifeworld. I want the book to transport people into the East Black Sea villages to make them feel what it means to live with a river—what sensations, bodily affects, and emotions such a life engenders. On the other hand, I want the book to have an impact on a more conceptual level in demonstrating how we can think about environmental struggles in a different way, as struggles for coexistence, and how we can put seemingly very different theories and approaches in dialogue to analyze activism and political agency. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

OY: I prioritize presenting my work in public settings these days while I continue working on the themes I discussed in the book in a different, more accessible language. I also aim to expand my focus to read and write about the environmental movements in the wider Middle Eastern geography.

I also am working on a personal project—a book on motherhood that discusses my own lived experience in close dialogue with feminist and psychoanalytical theories. Another project is writing a book on phenomenology and body in a more accessible language in the future.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter Four, “Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and the Immanence of the Past in the Present,” pages 120 to 125) 

Memories of the Body, Memories of the Place: Retrieving the Past through Embodied Sensory Interactions with River Waters 

Everyday, even banal personal memories of persons, events, and places remain underrepresented within the field of memory studies, which is mainly occupied with collective-social memories. Memories of everyday life and experiences, however, are central to our sense of self and our attachment to place. When we talk about memory, we refer to a mental capacity—to remember and reclaim, to retain and retrieve. We mostly overlook the ways in which this act of recollection occurs within and through the corporeal-material interaction of our bodies with our environments. Bodies are not only central to how we experience the world; they are also fundamental to how we store and reclaim those experiences as memories. Memory, in this sense, can be defined as “a process of encoding and storing records of experience which can be retrieved or which re-emerge in subsequent practice”, which involves lived bodies, things, and environments situated in place. 

The concept of body memory, on the other hand, is largely associated with implicit memory, what Merleau-Ponty defined as “knowledge in the hands.” Body memory, however, is not limited to this habitual type, which is widely discussed through well-known examples of riding a bike or playing piano as implicit recollection of pre-reflexive knowledge that is embodied in and expressed through physical activities. Body memory entails a broader range of memories of “being bodily in the world” as “instances of remembering places, events and people with and in the lived body”. Casey is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject when he defines body memory as a “trace,” as “a survival of the past, an enjambment” in his published course notes. The past, in other words, exists in the present in bodies, through body memory. In the case of the East Black Sea Region, corporeal survival of the past, in the bodies of people and in the waters of the river, is constitutive of their political subjectivities as they protest against hydropower plant development. 

Thomas Fuchs maintains that corporeal experiences anchored in body memory “spread out and connect with the environment like an invisible network, which relates us to things and to people.” Body memories extend to spaces, places, and situations. They are very much entangled with the tangible materiality of our place-world. Memory is, then, like perception, not the act of remembering that occurs in an isolated mind; it is a complex intercorporeal and situational process whereby places, bodies, and things re-enact the past. It is not limited to a set of abstract recollections insofar as the past is not represented, but is re-enacted, as Bergson once put it, through body memory, through the everyday sensory relationship with river waters. Thus, we access the past not so much through images and words, but primarily through immediate experience and action, in place. 

The example both Thomas Fuchs and Hartmut Rosa invoke is the famous madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The episode, as is well known, illustrates how a piece of tea-soaked cake brings complex memories back. It demonstrates how familiar sensations aroused by certain spaces, places, situations, and bodily encounters can function as memory cores that recall and release enclosed memories under suitable circumstances. Fuchs discusses this in terms of “situational” and “intercorporeal” memory. I encountered various examples of situational and intercorporeal memory when I asked villagers about their motivations behind opposing hydropower projects. Particularly in the case of middle-aged and older residents, the memories of their childhood and their parents often came up. Those memories often involved their bodily-sensory connection with river waters. Semra explained to me how her memories and personal history are inextricably bound up with the river waters in front of her house:

I see my mother and my father by this [Arılı] river; every time I look at the river I remember them. …We are keen on our history. How could I give up on my river?

The first sentence of Semra’s statement clarifies how memory cores work. The visual memory of her mother and her father by the river is released every time she sees the river in the present. 

 ……

“Senses are powerful sources of body memory,” Susan Steward tells us, due to the body’s capacity to carry memories of senses somatically. Oftentimes our sensory memories, which are embodied registers of our encounters with the sensible world, involve more than one sense in complex interaction. As they are anchored in place, memories of senses are situational memories, to use Fuchs’s typology. And, as in the example of the madeleine, different senses participate in various combinations in situational memory. Situational memory emerges through the interaction of bodies, places, and things under certain circumstances, and reflects the multisensory character of those everyday interactions. Let us take the example of Selime, whom I mentioned above. Selime, who was around sixty years old at the time we talked, told me that she was ready to die to protect the river, and pointed to a spot several hundred meters ahead along the riverbed: 

Look, there is a waterfall over there. We used to take a break here with my parents when we were on our way to the plateau [yayla]. We would always eat and sleep next to the river during our journey.

Every time Selime sees that waterfall, or walks again along the river to the plateau, every time she sleeps and wakes up—as her house is located by the river—to the sound of it, she remembers her childhood, her parents, and the intimacy she shared with them, which are anchored in place and, most of all, in the very flow of the river. 

Memories of the past localized in the body become the present. For Selime, it is the multisensory body memories, as well as her embodied experiences of river waters in the present, that retrieve those memories, that connect her, now middle-aged, to rivers and to her long-gone childhood and ancestors. Ayten Aydın, from Arhavi (EBR), also talks about her childhood memories when she is asked about her opposition to HEPPs. Her memories are also multisensory body memories of river waters: 

Our mothers worked in the fields. We, the children, used to go down to the river and spend all day there. The river was our playground.  We used to drink from it, eat our meals by it, and wash ourselves with its waters. We will fight to the end, and we won’t give up on our river. 

 ……

The past leaks in to the present with the flow of the river, as childhood experiences are retrieved within the constant everyday interaction and sensory connection with its waters. The loss of the river might not mean the loss of memories per se, as mental constructs. But it means the loss of the “intimate relation between memory and place, realized through the lived body,” and the loss of the “immanence of the past in the present”. 
Dec 16, 2024 Lebanon
Sana Murrani By :
Sana Murrani

Sana Murrani, Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003–2023 (New Texts Out Now)

Sana Murrani, Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003–2023 (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Sana Murrani (SM): The reason for writing this book is deeply rooted in my personal and professional journey as an architect from Baghdad who has lived experiences of trauma, war, and loss. Having grown up during the Iraq-Iran War and the subsequent multitudes of aggression and deprivation across the country until the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion, I have long been compelled to understand how people in different parts of the country navigate and cope with such adversities spatially. Witnessing the ways in which Iraqis create refuge and reinvent their environments amidst war and violence has profoundly inspired this work.

There is a scarcity of research on the region’s informal spatial practices of refuge, particularly in Iraq, which faces a wide spectrum of traumas and socio-political struggles. This book addresses that gap, giving voice and visibility to Iraqis while serving as a tribute to all Iraqis, both living and lost, over decades of ruptures and destruction. While it acknowledges the traumas and violence endured, it also highlights the ingenious ways people have responded creatively in their pursuit of refuge.
It proposes a dual articulation of rupture—both as an infliction of trauma and as a creative response through place-making.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SM: The book addresses critical topics, centering on the spatial and temporal dimensions of architecture, trauma, memory, creativity, and imagination in the context of Iraq's recent history. It situates architecture as a discourse and practice that navigates the tensions between permanence and transience, particularly in a landscape scarred by decades of war and violence. The book examines how architecture, rather than being static, becomes a site of power, resistance, and trauma. It delves into the transformative years between 2003 and 2023, using creative storytelling and deep mapping techniques, along with interviews with Iraqis from across the country. The narratives are supported by specific case studies of buildings and sites where trauma has permanently altered their use, illustrating the evolving nature of cities and spaces amidst protracted violence.

The book argues that post-trauma reconstruction should not aim to restore cities to their pre-war state but must recognize the irreversible changes wrought by violence and the transformations experienced by both people and spaces. It creates spatial stories from fifteen interviews with Iraqis, spanning the 2003 US-led invasion; the sectarian violence between 2006 and 2008, atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Daesh, in 2014 against the Yazidi community in Sinjar (in the northwest of Iraq) and Mosul; the 2019 Tishreen Movement (also known as the October Movement; Tishreen is the Arabic word for October); the Covid-19 pandemic; and the manifestation of climate crises in Iraq, up to 2023. These narratives are visually mapped to highlight the resilience, creativity, and refuge-making practices of Iraqis, demonstrating how these practices serve as forms of resistance and emphasizing the complex dynamics of trauma, memory, and place-making after place-wounding.

Drawing on a feminist spatial practice lens, the book elaborates on Edward Said’s concept of a “struggle over geography” and Edward Soja’s “spatial justice” by proposing a manifesto of spatial justice with a view from Iraq. It proposes a dual articulation of rupture—both as an infliction of trauma and as a creative response through place-making. This duality is essential for understanding how refuge spaces emerge as sites of resistance and transformation. Methodologically, the book employs a creative deep mapping approach, using memory-work, storytelling, and autoethnography to create palimpsestic narratives that layer spatial, social, and political dimensions. This non-linear method captures the complex interplay between trauma and memory, presenting a multidimensional analysis of refuge-making practices in Iraq. You can view a visual archive of the deep maps created on this link. 

Through interdisciplinary literature from scholars of southern narratives’ expertise and particularly Iraqi and Middle Eastern scholars, the book positions architecture as a political and active practice that navigates scales of difference and justice. By expanding the definition of architecture beyond aesthetics and professional norms, it frames refuge as an ongoing, creative, and political process—a transformative response to the ruptures inflicted by war and violence.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

SM: I have always viewed architecture and its practice as a discourse engaged with constant change and transience in space, events, experiences, and time. This ongoing struggle with the field's inherent spatial fixity is central to my research, especially in the context of this book, where the destruction of homes, public buildings, neighbourhoods, cities, and livelihoods has scarred the geography of Iraq for decades, if not centuries. Since my time as a Master’s student at the University of Baghdad’s School of Architecture, just before the 2003 invasion, I developed a fascination with the instability of architecture and its relation to other fields of practice.

In my PhD thesis, completed in the United Kingdom, I experimented with architecture made using alternative materials—futuristic ones that allow for change and transience without scarring cities, creating a form of "making otherwise." Throughout my academic career, I have positioned myself as an unconventional architect, advocating for reuse and restoration rather than new construction. As you know, the building industry significantly contributes to climate change. I often tell my students, now studying architecture, that our profession forces us to "break in order to make." We have to chop trees, dig into the earth, and mix concrete to build. This "place-wounding" for the sake of "place-making" is part of the profession’s daily reality. Therefore, to create an alternative form of architecture, we must think and make otherwise.

This is why I have dedicated all my previous work to this book—finding the right tools, methods, and conceptual frameworks rooted in place and people's attachments to place-making to explore alternative ways of making architecture. I have worked closely with those displaced—refugees, people seeking asylum, and internally displaced persons—who have lost their sense of belonging and attachment to familiar places, helping them to find their place through participatory design practices and co-creation.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SM: I envision this book reaching a diverse readership. Core disciplines such as architecture and design, particularly those invested in humanitarian and adaptive structures, as well as human geography, sociology, and politics, are primary audiences. Scholars interested in concepts of home, domesticity, urbanity, borders, war, and protective structures like shelter will find valuable insights. Beyond academia, I expect practicing architects, designers, humanitarian and development practitioners, and activists to engage with its content. Organizations like UN-Habitat, UNDP, and Architecture Sans Frontières, along with museums and cultural heritage institutions, could also benefit from the perspectives shared. To ensure broader reach, I have intentionally written the book in an accessible style, inviting a wider audience interested in the geo/spatial politics of Iraq’s recent history through people’s stories.

In terms of impact, the book seeks to advance the field of spatial justice within architecture, specifically in Iraq’s context, through empirical fieldwork and critical, reflexive, and performative practice that expand on post-war and conflict urban studies, proposing a socially rooted practice for developing structures of refuge, especially in post-war scenarios. The book also emphasizes the importance of seeing architecture otherwise, beyond fixed aesthetics, and affords new design possibilities that can anticipate and respond to future trauma. A justice-centered approach must integrate these refuge spaces into diverse forms of homing and more-than-inhabitation practices. In volatile and unstable geographies, a fixed perspective is insufficient; we require a framework of knowledge that, while fragmented and nonlinear, remains both performative and imaginative. Only then can we truly address the ever-shifting spatial needs of those navigating the aftermath of trauma.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SM: Since completing the book, I have been working on a project with survivors of the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq, creating a "ruptured atlas" that traces their odyssey of home, forced displacement, encampment, migration, and, for some, their return to Sinjar. As part of my recent appointment as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre, I have begun working on a project called Post-Colonial Geographies of Resistance: Mapping Spatial Justice in the Middle East. This project explores the political performativity and imagination embedded in mapping the Middle East, interrogating how Western cartographic practices historically divided the region and continue to shape contemporary geopolitical and cultural landscapes.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion: A Manifesto for Structures of Refuge in Spatial Justice, pages 192 to 194)

This research illuminates the transformative potential of map-making, expanding its role from a tool of mere representation to one of knowledge production. It reveals the intricacy of the task of visually capturing the negotiated spatiality that is tethered to memory, imagination and trauma. Importantly, this research finds that the maps produced serve as vital platforms for both encapsulating and expressing the traumatic experiences of Iraqis. Laden with affective layers of identity, belonging and memory-work, these maps capture ephemeral meaning while also providing a dynamic account of trauma in the making – factors that emphasize the performativity of map-making as a practice (Della Dora 2009). The making of these maps functions as a potent practice into the lived experience of trauma, presenting a unique topological frame of knowledge around place-wounding. The study also uncovers the iterative technical composition of the maps, highlighting a profound empathy between diverse geographies across Iraq. This is further reflected in the amalgamation of collapsed geographies and microgeographies of memories and events across three performative scales: the conceptual, the material and the geospatial. As such, these maps serve various purposes: as a cathartic process, a visual documentation of stories at risk of fading from personal and collective memory, and as a method of practising the making of refuge spaces. These findings underscore the disruptive potential of map-making as a means of narrating trauma spatially. The research suggests the potential for a broader application of these methodologies into other critical geographies, contexts and disciplines.

In order to effectively narrate the trauma experienced by Iraqis and to engage with various intended audiences – academics, researchers, policymakers, the media and the general public – it was necessary to adopt many multifaceted modes of practice. These modes included interviews that were transcribed and translated, the thematic coding and analysis of the spatiality described, and the spatially layered moments of trauma that became the core of each map. Other creative forms of representation were also incorporated into the map-making process, such as trauma-focused pop-up books portraying the interviewees’ photographs, three-dimensional depictions of the spatiality of these traumas, and postcards. This creative, ‘palimpsestuous’ (Dillon 2007) approach facilitated the intricate layers of knowledge production through its performative role in the methodology of deep mapping. The reach of this palimpsest of trauma narratives was further extended through an online visual archive (Murrani 2023) as well as an exhibition at the LSE Middle East Centre. These platforms allowed for a diverse range of creative expressions, all offering different perspectives on the narration of spatial trauma. These varied expressions have opened up yet more pathways for this kind of work, including the promotion of self-perceived recovery from trauma and loss, enhancing quality of life through the arts and spatial practice, and improving access to equity and justice. Furthermore, they inform public and political debates that challenge established norms, ways of thinking and modes of practice. The multilayered approach used in this research not only showcases the power and potential of interdisciplinary methods in addressing complex social issues, but also directly contributes a new framework for knowledge-making as a spatial practice in the context of Iraq, culminating in a manifesto for structures of refuge in spatial justice.