Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World

Guest lecture on 28 November 2019

Focusing on the IKEA Foundation-sponsored “Better Shelter”, guest speaker Elisa Pascucci explored the role of logistical calculative rationales in the provision of emergency housing for refugees. She talked about the technologies that allow refugee shelter products – conceptualized as “humanitarian goods” – to circulate across production sites, camps, and disaster and border zones. In doing so, she highlighted their connections to broader infrastructures and commercial networks in what recent literature has called “supply-chain humanitarianism” (Ziadah, 2019).

​Elisa Pascucci (PhD Sussex, UK) is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a human geographer whose research interests include humanitarian infrastructures and economies in the Mediterranean and Middle East, the social effects and everyday politics of border regimes, and migrant and refugee political agency and mobilization. Elisa is also affiliated researcher in the project HUMBorders, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and based at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her work has been published, among others, in the journals Global Networks, Area, International Political Sociology and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.