Abstract

This article examines how third-generation Palestinian women born and raised in Qatar sustain cultural continuity and negotiate belonging in everyday life. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews and short-term ethnographic engagement, and using women’s accounts as an empirical lens, it examines how strong Palestinian cultural and political identification coexists with deep biographical attachment to Qatar in a context where return remains constrained and legal status does not necessarily correspond to lived belonging. In dialogue with diaspora and cultural theory, particularly Hall’s approach to identity and Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, the study approaches cultural preservation as an ongoing practice of renewal rather than the preservation of an entirely unchanged cultural core. It finds that hybridity can operate as a form of agency through which cultural repertoires are maintained, adapted, and reworked, while remaining negotiated and sometimes contested by participants themselves. By foregrounding an underexamined Gulf-based, third-generation Palestinian case, the article contributes empirical insight to scholarship on Palestinian diaspora, belonging, and hybridity beyond camp-based and conventional citizenship-based contexts.​

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