This dissertation examines the specific forms of embodied suffering war and its refugee aftermath brings to female Sudanese refugees currently living in post-revolution Cairo, Egypt in order to illustrate the suffering and healing enacted within everyday life. These women, displaced from the Second Sudanese Civil War, are what I label Sudan's `Lost Girls.' The theoretical framework I employ in order to discuss their lives is a critical medical anthropology perspective based on the mindful body. I engage anthropological literature on the body in order to better understand the embodied suffering, sexual violence, and refugee aftermath of war. My research seeks to do this through distinctly gendered analyses and equally importantly, visual analyses. The research draws on historical news data collected through content analysis, contemporary qualitative data collected during fieldwork in the form of observation and interviews, with a particular emphasis on photovoice methodology. The work proposes that the humanizing aspect of emotions revealed by Lost Girls' photography of their everyday lives in urban Cairo allows for critical analysis of the many and varied ways in which women's `ordinary' experiences of war have been hidden, the implications of this for international responses to their suffering, and areas for exploring new, non-emergency refugee policies based on more ethnographically informed, gendered contextualizations of `extraordinary' violence.

This is a transdisciplinary study of how ‘popular cultures of survival’ regenerate and rehumanise township residents and communities whose social fabric and intergenerational bonds have been violently torn by endemic suffering. I focus specifically on township mothers’ and daughters’ lifeworlds with the aim of recentering these marginalised lives so that they can inform us about retheorising marginality and in this way enrich our limited academic discourses on the subjectivities of poor urban African women. Located in the interdisciplinary field of popular culture studies, the study draws on and synthesises theoretical insights from a number of disciplines such as sociology, political-science, anthropology, history, literary studies, womanist and feminist studies and indigenous studies, while using a variety of methods and sources such as interviews, reports, observation, newspapers, field notes, photo-albums, academic articles and embodied expressions to create a unique theory on the lived and embodied suffering and healing experiences of township women. I have called this situated conceptual framework that is theoretically aligned to African womanism and existential phenomenology, but principally fashioned out of township mothers and daughters ways of understanding the world and their place in it--Township mothers’ and daughters’ lived and embodied ‘cultures of survival’. And in order to surface their popular cultural survival strategies I have adopted an African womanist interpretative phenomenological methodological framework. This suggested conceptual and methodological framework has allowed me to creatively explore the dialectical tensions of the everyday township philosophies, aesthetics and moralities of ‘ukuphanta’, to hustle and ‘ukuhlonipha’, to respect, and show how they create the moral-existential ground for township mothers and daughters not only to continue to survive, but to reclaim lives of dignity and sensuality amidst repeated negation and historical hardships. / Sociology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)

This is a transdisciplinary study of how ‘popular cultures of survival’ regenerate and rehumanise township residents and communities whose social fabric and intergenerational bonds have been violently torn by endemic suffering. I focus specifically on township mothers’ and daughters’ lifeworlds with the aim of recentering these marginalised lives so that they can inform us about retheorising marginality and in this way enrich our limited academic discourses on the subjectivities of poor urban African women. Located in the interdisciplinary field of popular culture studies, the study draws on and synthesises theoretical insights from a number of disciplines such as sociology, political-science, anthropology, history, literary studies, womanist and feminist studies and indigenous studies, while using a variety of methods and sources such as interviews, reports, observation, newspapers, field notes, photo-albums, academic articles and embodied expressions to create a unique theory on the lived and embodied suffering and healing experiences of township women. I have called this situated conceptual framework that is theoretically aligned to African womanism and existential phenomenology, but principally fashioned out of township mothers and daughters ways of understanding the world and their place in it--Township mothers’ and daughters’ lived and embodied ‘cultures of survival’. And in order to surface their popular cultural survival strategies I have adopted an African womanist interpretative phenomenological methodological framework. This suggested conceptual and methodological framework has allowed me to creatively explore the dialectical tensions of the everyday township philosophies, aesthetics and moralities of ‘ukuphanta’, to hustle and ‘ukuhlonipha’, to respect, and show how they create the moral-existential ground for township mothers and daughters not only to continue to survive, but to reclaim lives of dignity and sensuality amidst repeated negation and historical hardships. / Sociology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)