What strategies and techniques are used to shelter the forcibly displaced? What assumptions are these based upon? What are their effects? This research examines humanitarian shelter from three distinctive angles.

First, through the study of material culture: this project examines shelters, site designs, and remnants of informal housing in order to understand humanitarian techniques and the vernacular practices of people on the move.

This project examines humanitarian nutrition and its history from the 19th century to the present day.

Through archival research, fieldwork, and the analysis of humanitarian handbooks, it examines how Victorian technologies such as the soup kitchen were transformed into contemporary mechanisms for emergency feeding. This involved a series of historical transformations: from communal to individual designs, from vernacular to technical foods, and from personal to impersonal measurements.