Experientiality of a Refugee Camp Space Through Children’s Spatial Negotiation in Elizabeth Laird’s Welcome to Nowhere

This paper explores the experientiality of young children as they navigate, negotiate, and belong in the refugee camp space, considering Elizabeth Laird’s young adult novel Welcome to Nowhere, which centres on Syrian children in Jordan’s Za’atari Refugee camp. Applying a qualitative textual analysis of Laird’s novel and Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad, the article examines how children respond to the camps’ physical boundaries and how they build relational agency to negotiate the camp space for a sense of belonging. Moving from the traditional portrayal of children as passive victims, our analysis finds that ‘the production of space’ in a refugee camp’s context is a negotiated process by the young children. In the novel, the protagonist, Omar, and other un/accompanied children covertly repurpose the space as their own, subtly subverting the camp’s conceived layout. Through this exploration, we seek to unravel how the novel navigates its narrative to foreground how the children reimagine, reclaim, and redefine the constrained camp space through spatial negotiation to produce a sense of belonging. By foregrounding their embodied experiences in the context of spatial precarity, the study integrates young adult literature into discussions of forced migration, underscoring optimism, expectancy, and belonging among refugee children.