Constitutive Disorder As Method: A Multilingual Dictionary From Within the Camp
Published online on May 13, 2026
Abstract
["Population, Space and Place, Volume 32, Issue 4, May 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article analyzes Multilingual Dictionary – Living Together in a Refugee Camp, a co‐research project documenting words and expressions created, invented, and circulated among migrant communities in the Moria and Mavrovouni camps on Lesvos Island between 2018 and 2022. As a living archive, the dictionary captures the embodied vocabularies of survival and resistance shaped by displacement and confinement. Situated at the intersection of sovereign‐imposed order and emergent constitutive disorder, the article draws on the concepts of heterotopia and assemblage to examine how the camp operates as both a space of exclusion and a site of political agency. It argues that disorder, expressed through non‐linear, improvised, and accented language, functions as a generative force within the heterotopic space of the camp, enabling the formation of counter‐knowledge and autonomous migrant subjectivities. By situating the dictionary within the broader history of anti‐camp movements, the article explores how practices of minor historiography, accent, and reassembly challenge dominant regimes of categorization, producing alternative ways of living, knowing, and resisting within the camp's dispositifs."]