Graffiti Art, Digital Stories, and Social Media

Abstract

We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of two events that we witnessed—one unannounced and the other planned—during our January 2014 fieldtrip visit to the Ibdaa office at the Dheisheh refugee camp to point out how children’s and young people’s political mobilization is actualized as anguish, pain, suffering, not as feelings but as affect and embodiment grounded in the precognitive and non-linguistic realms. First, during the conversations with the cofounder and board director of Ibdaa, Khaled Al-Saifi, unbeknownst to us, a street protest erupted near the entrance of the Dheisheh refugee camp. Al-Saifi went out to find out what was going on, came back, and asked us to look out of the windows on the top floor. We saw several children, between the ages 10 and 12, burning trash and tires near the UN office. As a form of street protest, this is not uncommon in the OPT. Both, the UNRWA, which is responsible for running the education, health, and relief and social services programs for the refugee camps, and the PA, with municipal and regulatory powers, have been facing protests from the workers demanding higher wages that led to the accumulation of garbage in the refugee camps and the streets. What stood out to us was the manner in which the children were rolling the tires, gathering the trash into a heap, some bringing out the rotting trash from the streets, others joining in the protest on the sidelines.