New publication by Clara De La Hoz Del Real

A new chapter by Clara De La Hoz Del Real has been published in Across the Aegean: A Century of Forced Migrations Between Greece and Turkey, 1922–2022, edited by Violetta Hionidou and Dimitris Skleparis and published by Routledge in 2026.

Entitled “Lived experiences of dehumanisation: a case study of Asylum Seekers in the Zervou Refugee Camp in Samos, Greece, 2022–2024,” the chapter explores how asylum seekers experience and make sense of processes of dehumanisation in the everyday life of a refugee camp. Rather than treating dehumanisation simply as an abstract category, Clara examines its lived dimensions and the ways in which institutional arrangements, categorisation and everyday encounters can affect recognition, dignity and agency.

The research was conducted alongside PREFER, as a complementary line of enquiry emerging from a question that sits close to the project’s central concerns: what happens when the conditions of human existence themselves become threatened? PREFER approaches this question through the study of situations experienced as potentially terminal - situations in which not only lives, but ways of living, relations and worlds may be at stake. Clara’s work on dehumanisation approaches the question from a different direction: what happens when people are progressively denied recognition as fully human?

The two perspectives thus offer an intriguing conceptual counterpoint: the end of humanity and the dehumanisation of humans. While the chapter draws on research carried out specifically in the context of asylum and refugee reception in Samos, its engagement with lived experience, categorisation and the preservation or erosion of human agency resonates strongly with the broader questions explored within PREFER.