Rights for Time: Rethinking the Temporal Dimensions of Humanitarian Protection​

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The Institute for Critical Thought hosted the Jordan case study of the Rights for Time research network. Abdullah M. Awad was also a fellow for the network at large, anchoring the network’s work in Jordan while contributing to its broader intellectual and methodological direction in the Global South. Working through ICT across the network’s three thematic strands—Time and Language, Time and Trauma, and Time and Art—he collaborated with partner teams to refine research design, strengthen methodological coherence, and support the integration of artistic practice into humanitarian inquiry across the network’s countries. In this capacity, he also consulted across partner contexts on the interface between research and art practice and authored the network’s Arts Report, synthesizing lessons from commissioned projects and articulating how creative methods can render visible the temporal, indirect, and compound harms that humanitarian frameworks often overlook. As part of the network, he published the Rights for Time arts report and co-authored academic articles on rethinking the temporal dimensions of humanitarian protection.

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Rights for Time: An Introduction

Rights for Time begins from a simple critique: humanitarian research and policy often privilege the immediate and visibly urgent effects of crisis, while protracted crises generate indirect, cumulative, and less visible harms that unfold over time. By foregrounding time as an analytic and ethical dimension, the network develops alternative lenses for understanding “compound harm”—from colonial afterlives and nationalism to social fragmentation and environmental catastrophe—drawing on three interconnected strands: language, trauma, and art.

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Time and Language: How Does the Refugee Enter Language?

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This project examines how the term “refugee”—as a modern legal and statistical category—can reshape a displaced person’s identity and agency over long durations, and asks what older, locally inherited vocabularies in the Arab-Islamic tradition reveal about displacement, endurance, and social belonging.

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Approach: a multidisciplinary method combining historical research, philology, literary analysis, and ethnographic interviews with displaced people living in Jordan. The project also prioritized community involvement through training local research assistants and translators.

Contribution: by tracing how language mediates experience over time, the project challenges humanitarian and bureaucratic vocabularies (governmental and NGO/UN frameworks) and proposes that attention to inherited terms can open pathways to agency and more adequate policy imagination.

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Outputs: an Arabic book manuscript in preparation for publication in Jordan (with a bilingual Arabic–English edition in progress), alongside a sculptural artwork exhibited in Amman and public discussions on how visual art can bypass the limits of discursive policy language.

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Time and Trauma: Palestine Trauma Centre and the Tarkiz Program (Gaza)

 

This strand focuses on how trauma in ongoing-conflict environments produces layered and intersecting forms of distress that conventional models of intervention may not fully capture. It explores Tarkiz, a culturally adapted psychosocial approach implemented in Gaza over many years, and asks what “success” looks like when interventions are adapted to the realities of chronic war trauma.

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Approach: practitioners in Gaza were trained in qualitative interviewing, conducted semi-structured interviews with colleagues and past clients, and produced transcripts and reports. The data were then thematically analyzed to understand perceived mechanisms of impact and culturally specific meanings of wellbeing.

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Key findings: the perceived transformative power of Tarkiz is linked not only to individual symptom relief, but to community re-engagement—strengthening bonds, restoring participation, and using culturally resonant practices and adaptations led by community-embedded practitioners.

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Contribution: the project shows how culturally adapted psychosocial support can treat “community disconnection” as central—reframing mental health success through restored relationships and social reintegration—while also offering an example of collaborative, culturally sensitive partnership in global public health. Publication may be accessed here. 

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Time and Art: Arts, Research, and Healing Across Contexts

 

Art was central to Rights for Time, with commissioned projects across Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Uganda, Cameroon, and Pakistan. Outputs ranged from books and photography to performance, sound, installations, and sculpture. The Arts strand argues that art is uniquely capable of illuminating and responding to harm that is difficult to access through interviews or standardized research alone.

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Why art matters (across projects):

• Expands what can be expressed: art can carry complex experience without requiring the participant to “speak the researcher’s language,” making it especially valuable for children and communities alienated by formal or jargon-heavy research.

• Reveals hidden tensions: artistic practice can surface conflict, memory, and taboo realities that may remain unspoken in conventional research settings, including contexts shaped by censorship or social constraint.

• Deepens ethical reflection: because art involves mediation, form, and representation, it often forces project leaders to confront positionality and ethical complexity more fully than procedural research ethics alone.

• Supports healing and durable impact: art can create protected spaces for recognition, dialogue, and collective repair; its outputs (film, books, portable media) can outlive the project and travel, enabling wider dissemination and longer-term resonance.

 

Illustrative insights: across contexts, art enabled participants to move beyond fixed victimhood into a dynamic social world of suffering and joy, memory and resilience. Projects also evolved practices organically—experimenting with multiple media (from creative writing to tactile arts) to build expressions of strength, endurance, and future orientation. Arts report may be accessed here.