Small Things

Abstract

AbstractIn 2018 and 2019, students from NYU Abu Dhabi spent a week participating, observing, and learning in a refugee camp in Djibouti as a part of an intensive January term course on Displacement and Migration across the Red Sea. This chapter discusses the contours of this student-and-refugee engagement and its relation to the author’s prior ethnographic research and collaborative photography projects in the camp. Revisiting how the university students and their refugee hosts experienced these events, and addressing questions of ethics, value, and privilege, the chapter unsettles common assumptions about who was teaching and helping whom. As flawed and uneven as these educational journeys can be, the chapter argues that what is to be gained from these encounters are not just “small things.”