دانلود کتاب انسانی‌سازی داده‌ها: روایت‌گری مبتنی بر نمونه‌های واقعی در یک اردوگاه پناهجویان

The number of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) is growing globally, reaching nearly 120 million in 2025. With wars, authoritarian governments, and the impact of climate change, millions of people across the planet are forced to leave their homes and, sometimes, flee their countries. Most forcibly displaced people are from conflict-affected low-income countries and seek refuge in the immediate neighbouring states. Only a minority travel onwards to Europe or North America. Around the world, public narratives about forcibly displaced people are usually based on storytelling at the extremes, in which refugees are portrayed as villains, victims, or heroes. People forced to flee are often stereotyped as opportunistic jobseekers, unwelcome competitors, and violent criminals. Alternatively, they may be represented through outlying examples of extreme hardship or even success against the odds—the refugee athlete or the refugee entrepreneur. These stereotypes may be shared by the media, politicians, or advocacy groups. These accounts may be authentic but, because they only portray the extremes, they risk skewing public understanding about the everyday realities faced by the majority of forcibly displaced people. More than 85 per cent of the world’s forcibly displaced people live in low- and middle-income countries. The African continent hosts the largest number of forcibly displaced people, where around two-thirds live in camps. Most members of the public, including key policymakers, will never travel to major host countries in Africa, such as Uganda, Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya, let alone visit a refugee or IDP camp. The aim of this book is twofold: first, to address the way refugees’ stories are often distorted or selectively represented in media and political discourse by providing an alternative approach to storytelling that is both academically rigorous and accessible; second, to offer a more representative account of what it is like to live in a refugee camp. We focus on Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, the second-largest camp in Africa, which hosted more than 300,000 refugees by the end of 2025. It is located close to the border with war-torn South Sudan and hosts refugees from several unstable neighbouring countries. Like other large camps around the world (such as Kutupalong in Bangladesh, Zaatari in Jordan, or Bidi Bidi in Uganda), it is located in a remote border region, offers limited opportunity for refugees to access employment, and is served by humanitarian aid organizations. In theory, refugee camps are intended to be temporary facilities built to provide emergency assistance, but in practice, they often last decades, resulting in people living in them for many years. We developed and implemented a new research methodology that we call ‘Representative Storytelling’. As social scientists, we usually have two main tools available to us: qualitative and quantitative research methods. Qualitative methods study rich narrative accounts of people’s lives, but the question is always how representative these stories are. Quantitative methods can be representative, but they can be complex, dry, and dehumanizing, reducing people’s experiences to a few statistics. Representative Storytelling proposes to integrate these approaches in a novel and complementary way. It seeks to humanize data by linking statistics to real stories and to contextualize stories by situating them within representative data. We implemented this methodology in Kakuma between 2022 and 2024. We first collected representative quantitative data on the camp population, interviewing a sample of over 1,000 refugee households whose characteristics mirrored those of the entire camp. We then rank ordered the households in the data according to their income level and invited the households at each decile (ten percentage-point intervals) for in-depth, on-camera interviews. These conversations were conducted with the household member who identified as the most knowledgeable about their situation to understand their lived experience of life within Kakuma. Rather than being chosen because they represent a sensationalist story of triumph or disaster, they represent a particular income level within the broader population.