• Forced and Voluntary Migration; Displacement; Exile; Subjectivity
• Refugee Camps; Politics and Discourses of humanitarianism; NGO’s
• Nation-states and Nation-Building; Cities and Citizenship; Middle-East

Heba Alnajada studied Architecture and Urban Design before beginning her Ph.D. in Architecture at University of California, Berkeley. Her former and current research broadly engages with refugee crises, politics of humanitarianism, and forms of subjectivity, specializing in the Levant and on Jordan in particular.

Her PhD research focuses on the evolving relationship between exiles, host states, and different forms of humanitarian and non-governmental organization. Illustrated by the particular case of Syrian exiles in Jordan, she looks at the complex terrain of exiles and the geopolitics of the Middle East conflict are manifested, negotiated and understood by Syrians in their everyday lives.  Her dissertation considers the ways in which the politics of displacement is intimately connected to the politics of space particularly in post-colonial countries.