About
Adam Ramadan’s work lies at the intersection between political and cultural geography. It addresses the ‘everyday’ of geopolitics, how ordinary people understand and negotiate their position within broader geopolitical dynamics. Much of this work has focused on the Middle East, and in particular on refugee issues.
Qualifications
MA Geography – University of Cambridge
MSc Modernity, Space and Place – University College London
DPhil Geography and the Environment – University of Oxford
Biography
Adam Ramadan studied Geography at Cambridge, UCL and Oxford, and was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in 2007. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 2009, was titled ‘Violent Geographies of Exile: Palestinian Refugees and Refugee Camps in Lebanon’. From 2009 to 2012, Adam was Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Downing College, Cambridge, and he joined Birmingham as Lecturer in Human Geography in October 2012.
Postgraduate supervision
Dr Ramadan would be happy to hear from potential graduate students with research proposals around the following areas:
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The Middle East
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The ‘Arab uprisings’
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Political geography / geopolitics
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War and peace
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Refugee geographies
Research
Research interests
Dr Ramadan’s principal current research project looks at how the ‘Middle East conflict’ is manifested, understood and negotiated in the everyday lives of ordinary people. In particular, he has worked with Palestinian refugees living in camps in Lebanon, seeking to understand how refugee camps are constructed as political and cultural spaces, and how refugees negotiate geographies of exclusion and conflict in their everyday lives. Dr Ramadan is writing a book, Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: The everyday geopolitics of exile, to be published by IB Tauris in 2013.
Two other developing research projects focus on protest camps, in particular the role of the camp at Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and geographies of justice, and the connections between justice and peace.
Other activities
Dr Ramadan is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, and a board member of the Political Geography Research Group.
He has given invited lectures and seminars at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Newcastle, British Columbia, and London (Royal Holloway), and to the London Group of Historical Geographers. He has also given research presentations at the annual conferences of the Association of American Geographers (2007 and 2010) and the Royal Geographical Society (2010 and 2012), as well as conferences and workshops at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the International Boundaries Research Unit, Durham University.
He has peer-reviewed for Antipode, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Global Networks, Journal of Refugee Studies, Geoforum, Security Dialogue, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and for the Council for British Research in the Levant.
Publications
Ramadan, A. (forthcoming) From Tahrir to the World: the camp as a political public space. European Urban and Regional Studies
Ramadan, A. (2012) Spatialising the refugee camp. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Ramadan, A. (2011) Hospitality and postnational peace. Political Geography 30(4) 195-196. 30(4) 195-196
Ramadan, A. (2011) Book review forum on Elden's Terror and Territory, guest edited by Christian Abrahamsson. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2) 251-254. 1(2) 251-254
Ramadan, A. (2010) In the Ruins of Nahr al-Barid: Understanding the meaning of the camp. Journal of Palestine Studies 40(1) 49-62. 40(1) 49-62
Ramadan, A. (2009) Destroying Nahr el-Bared: Sovereignty and urbicide in the space of exception. Political Geography 28(3) pp.153-163. 28(3) pp.153-163
Ramadan, A. (2009) A Refugee Landscape: Writing Palestinian nationalisms in Lebanon. ACME 8(1) 69-99. 8(1) 69-99
Fregonese, S., Martin, D. and Ramadan, A. (2009) The new geopolitics of responsibility in Barack Obama's Cairo speech. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(6) 951-955. 27(6) 951-955
Ramadan, A. (2008) The Guests' Guests: Palestinian refugees, Lebanese civilians, and the war of 2006. Antipode 40(4) 658-677. 40(4) 658-677