In Kutupalong, the world’s largest refugee camp, care, and control coexist in stark tension. Barbed-wire fences encircle the camp, turning it into a carceral space where the state enforces immobility and separation. Yet within these confines, humanitarian aid organizations construct roads, shelters, and systems of care, shaping a space where survival and resilience flourish amid restriction. My research explores this paradox—how a space meant to offer refuge also becomes a mechanism for containment, and how refugees resist and reshape their environment in response to these dual forces of power​​.

The coastal city of Cox’s Bazar has been transforming unevenly to accommodate the humanitarian workers and the informal urban refugees. While the city embraces infrastructure development to cater to the needs of aid organizations, the urban refugees’ survival is fraught with precarity and everyday navigation through surveillance structures. I conceptualize the process as “aid urbanism” that reshapes the city for global workers while refugees face exploitation and systemic violence. Working closely with both groups, I reveal how urbanization and masculinity intersect and the city becomes a site of intimate conflict and unexpected solidarities. In Cox’s Bazar, boundaries between citizens and refugees blur, disrupt, and reform​​.

My ethnography in highly securitized Bhasan Char frames it as the spatial embodiment of state-enforced isolation. Here, infrastructure serves as both a tool of governance and a mechanism of territorial exclusion. Framed as a long-term solution, this remote island is a site that emerges from political abandonment and ecological precarity that exemplifies the conditions of refugees living across the world and not only the Rohingyas. Yet, the everyday resilience and transient moments of cooperation across class and citizenship imply the struggle for a more just world.

Understanding the present “refugee crisis” demands looking into the past. My archival research uncovers colonial and postcolonial records—government orders, newspapers, immigration documents, and oral histories — to reveal how historical mobilities and territorial governance have evolved. By tracing the entangled histories of mobilities and displacement in the Bay of Bengal, I situate the current crisis within a longer continuum of state-led exclusions, forced migrations, and contested identities. This work historicizes today’s crisis and challenges static narratives of refugeehood, posing it as a dynamic process embedded in regional and global histories​​.

My multi-sited, multi-method approach follows the rhythms of life across the camp, city, and island. Moving alongside the refugees, local residents, government officials, and aid workers enabled me to uncover the complex human-environment relationships that define these spaces collectively. Through conversations in motion—on rickshaws, shared scooters, and crowded buses—I traced the fluidity of mobilities that shape both the refugees’ lived realities and the landscapes they inhabit. These fleeting yet profound encounters directed ethnographic understanding of resilience, survival, and connection. Repeated interactions culminated in completing over 200 in-depth interviews. My methodological approach frames displacement as navigated not just in fixed places but in the spaces between them. Coupled with archival research, visual analysis of photographs and digital media, and systematic integration using MAXQDA, my work bridges past and present to explore the spatial forces of mobility and containment.