Migrant Background Youth and Sensemaking of Place, Community and Belonging through Intergenerational Oral Histories in Jordan’s Industrial Heartland

Place-based community histories are complex navigations of differing perspectives and lived experiences which can be underpinned by traumatic, celebratory and/or claim-based narratives. These accounts offer multiple avenues to build a sense of ownership and belonging to place – particularly for migrant and refugee background communities who are looking to construct and forge new lives and to make sense of displacement and (re)settlement. Engaging and understanding the history of a place from the lived experiences of different (migrant) communities across multiple generations can provide a rich opportunity to understand how societies are shaped, and cities developed, by transnational and transcultural encounters.

This paper examines the work of the British Academy funded project Surfacing Zarqa, which trains young people living in Zarqa, Jordan’s industrial capital, to conduct oral history interviews with diverse communities that reside in the city. Zarqa has long been a home to refugee and migrant communities: it was founded by Chechen forced migrants in the early 20^th century, rapidly developed with the establishment of a Palestinian refugee camp in 1946 and ballooned with industry and the arrival of South Asian migrant workers from the 1970’s onward. Despite this rich and complex past, there is a significant lacuna of public and lived histories of the communities that consider the city ‘home’.

This paper considers three interconnected themes which centre around the communication of memories and sense of belonging within this diverse urban community: 1) How transcultural, transnational and transgenerational biographical histories intersect in an ‘overlooked’ industrial and refugee-receiving city. 2) How such histories and experiences are surfaced, communicated or silenced and 3) how critical engagement with these memories allow young people to situate their own sense of belonging, and to reimagine and reexamine their aspirations in, and beyond, the city of Zarqa and the Kingdom of Jordan.