Anas Alkhatib

Anas Alkhatib is a second-year Ph.D. student in the History and Theory of Architecture at Yale University. His research examines the relationship between architecture, political power, and everyday life, with particular attention to how material environments mediate the formation of subjectivities, social relations, and spatial agency. Working across architectural history, political theory, and anthropology, he investigates the entanglements of infrastructure, modernity, and governance, questioning how built environments both reproduce and unsettle established political and social orders. Alkhatib is the co-founder of Architects in Camps, an interdisciplinary architectural research and practice collective established in 2021 in Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Through collaborative research, spatial documentation, mapping, and design, the collective investigates the relationships between architecture, displacement, collective memory, and everyday practices of spatial transformation. His research and architectural work have been presented at Columbia University, the University of Manchester, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the University of Antwerp, and Birzeit University, as well as at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference.

Project Summary

Grounded in the spatial histories of the Middle East, his current research explores the everyday architectures of displacement, examining how domestic spaces, sanitation infrastructures, and ordinary practices of building and maintenance complicate conventional distinctions between permanence and temporariness, formality and informality, and state and society. More broadly, his work engages questions of humanitarianism, statelessness, political ecology, and the material conditions through which people inhabit, negotiate, and transform their worlds.

Research Area Keywords

Political Ecology, Infrastructure, Spatial Agency, Modernity, Displacement