Visual Voyages of Palestine Refugees: The Social and Political Life of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s Photo Archive

This study investigates UNRWA’s use of photography and archival practices in relation to Palestinian refugees, exploring the dynamics of an institutional archive that claims neutrality within the political reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It examines the role and manifestation of this UN archive – established by a 1949 United Nations mandate for facilitating humanitarian activities – in the context of one of the longest lasting forced migrations in recent history. To this end, the study asks how the intersection of the UNRWA archive as a repository of institutional heritage with bureaucracy, photographic practices and international diplomatic behaviors come together in the political reality of the Middle East, and how neutrality is understood in this context. This question is particularly pertinent in the fields of photographic and cultural history as scholars draw on the UNRWA archive as if it was a neutral, objective resource. Drawing on interviews, autoethnography, participatory observation, visual and archival analysis, chapter-by-chapter the thesis sheds light on how UNRWA employees, the majority of whom are from Palestinian descent, have negotiated their lived experiences in the regional conflict with their professional duties and responsibilities. In doing so, the study highlights the complexities, challenges and tensions within the hierarchical structure of the UNRWA archive, shifting scholarly attention away from the question of the influence of state power and nation building on the photographic representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict towards examination of the impact exerted on the dynamics of the visual framing of the conflict by micro-behaviors. In this sense, the study demonstrates how the prevailing tension between the archive’s employees and the archive’s aims challenge the position and performance of a United Nations agency in a violent conflict. Therefore, the study reveals how the nature of work dynamics within the archive has resulted in an assembly of politically charged visual records, politically charged organizational structures and politically imbued photographic uses, all of which divert from UNRWA’s stated intention to use its audio-visual archive to record and promote activities associated with its humanitarian mandate.