Introduction
This compendium documents the research, publications, and public presentations produced by Dr. Devora Neumark and Stephanie Acker through Home Ground Lab (HGL), the research and advocacy organisation they co-founded. The theoretical and methodological foundations of HGL’s work are rooted in Dr. Neumark’s longstanding research-creation practice developed over decades of engagement with questions of displacement, home, and beauty before HGL itself came into being. Stephanie Acker brought complementary expertise in policy, communications, and humanitarian practice, and together they built the lab whose strength lay precisely in that convergence. HGL completed its laboratory phase in January 2026, and both Dr. Neumark and Stephanie Acker are continuing their independent work in this field. The compendium is offered as a record of that collaborative body of work and as a resource for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and educators working at the intersection of aesthetics, displacement, and humanitarian response. The introduction traces the evolution of the work, its methodological approaches, and the convergence of evidence that makes its central argument compelling. It then addresses the practical implications for a range of professional audiences and the emerging priorities for future research and practice.
The work documented here spans three years of intensive research and public engagement, from November 2023 to November 2025. It comprises five publications, including two peer-reviewed policy briefs, one working paper, and two articles, and eleven presentations and lectures delivered to audiences ranging from U.S. State Department officials and United Nations shelter practitioners to university students, migration scholars, and neuroaesthetics researchers, as well as a three-part webinar series co-hosted with Clark University’s Integration and Belonging Hub. The venues include the European University Institute, Clark University, Monash University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Essex, the Global Shelter Cluster, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, and the Migration Working Group. Geographically, the case studies and research contexts span Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, post-flood reconstruction in Sindh, Pakistan, post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, displacement contexts in Colombia, Iraq, Kenya, Afghanistan, Chad, Malawi, Peru, the Maldives, and Indonesia, Kurdish communities in northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, post-genocide Rwanda, and the experiences of Hungarian, Indigenous North American, and other forcibly displaced communities, as well as Dr. Neumark’s foundational participatory research with over 200 forcibly displaced individuals resettled to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. An annex, The Beautiful Resistance, documents a global storytelling series of the same name in which displaced and affected individuals authored their own first-person narratives of beauty, resilience, and creative resistance, including poets from Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, Pakistani reconstruction practitioners, Rohingya women in Cox’s Bazar, Kurdish communities in northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, a Rwandan genocide survivor, an Indigenous North American scholar, and a Hungarian refugee.
The intellectual foundation of this body of work rests on a deceptively simple observation: that displaced people around the world, across more than 30 countries and six different legal statuses, consistently invest effort in beautifying their living spaces, even in temporary conditions, even knowing they may be evicted, and even under conditions of active conflict or extreme resource constraint. This observation was first documented through Dr. Neumark’s doctoral research, “Radical Beauty for Troubled Times: Involuntary Displacement and the (Un)Making of Home,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which examined the role of home beautification for individuals coming to terms with the traumas of involuntary displacement, and drew centrally on art philosopher Arthur Danto’s concept of third-realm beauty. Dr. Neumark’s longstanding engagement with Danto’s thinking, included the foundational claim from The Abuse of Beauty that "Beauty is an option for art and not a necessary condition. But it is not an option for life." This informed both their own doctoral work and, subsequently, their collaboration with Stephanie Acker. Acker’s peer-reviewed article “Beauty and Beautification in Refugees’ Lives and Their Implications for Refugee Policy,” published in Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees in 2023, synthesised nearly 100 published articles on refugee homemaking and confirmed that this remained a largely unexplored area of scholarship, with Dr. Neumark identified as one of only a handful of researchers working at this intersection at the time. The collaborative work that followed between Dr. Neumark and Stephanie Acker sought to build on and contribute to this emerging area, producing the research, advocacy, and public engagement documented in this compendium.
Jawaher Amin receives a newly distributed rainwater barrel in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in August 2024. This barrel was one of 10 provided to households that previously participated in the first phase of the Cultivating Beauty in Contested Places project.
Photo: Nizar ALayasa, 2024
The Evolution of the Work
The earliest entries in this compendium focused primarily on establishing the legitimacy of aesthetics as a dimension of humanitarian response, countering the assumption that beauty is a luxury. The November 2023 article in The Conversation, written in direct response to the Israel-Hamas war, made the case through the lens of Gaza: that even amid genocide, people create beauty, and that this impulse is not incidental but biologically wired into us, an assertion of identity, agency, and refusal to be defined solely by displacement. The December 2023 policy brief for the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre extended this argument into the domain of refugee self-reliance, drawing on four research studies conducted between 2008 and 2023 across more than 30 countries to demonstrate that home beautification practices advance the Global Compact on Refugees’ goal of self-reliance across multiple domains simultaneously, and calling on policymakers to recognise refugees as creative agents rather than passive recipients of aid.
From this foundation, the work deepened along two distinct but interrelated lines of inquiry. The first was theoretical and structural: challenging the dominance of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in humanitarian policy, a critique Dr. Neumark had first articulated publicly in 2014 in the context of the performance artwork Faire bon ménage, where they wrote that by ignoring the aesthetic dimension of displacement, the traumas associated with the loss of home are more likely to persist and undermine integration into a new living environment. The 2024 working paper and accompanying policy brief, both published through the European University Institute, developed this critique systematically, arguing that Maslow’s framework is fundamentally misaligned with refugee shelter contexts in three ways: its linear progression assumes needs are met sequentially, its individualistic focus clashes with collective community dynamics, and its universal framing overlooks culturally specific needs. Most critically, Maslow’s original hierarchy entirely excluded aesthetic experience, a gap that, as neuroaesthetics research demonstrates, has measurable consequences for wellbeing, trauma recovery, and resilience. These publications proposed a reimagined framework in which aesthetics, dignity, cultural expression, and belonging are treated not as secondary concerns to be addressed after survival needs are met, but as simultaneous and inseparable dimensions of recovery.
The second line of inquiry was empirical and contextual, grounded in specific communities and specific practices. Collaborative research with Palestinian storyteller Nizar ALayasa, a longtime friend of Dr. Neumark’s of more than 20 years, provided the richest single body of evidence in the compendium. When Dr. Neumark asked him what he wanted to research about his community, his answer was immediate: the gardens in the camps. Over two years beginning in 2023, Nizar conducted 30 community dialogues in Dheisheh and Al-Azza refugee camps, each one rooted in that same question of what beauty means to people living under conditions of protracted displacement and political constraint. Residents described how gardening in plastic containers on overcrowded balconies generated peace and stability for entire neighbourhoods, how physical objects carried from pre-1948 villages sustained cultural memory across generations, and how acts of beautification provided agency and a means of processing emotions too complex to put into words. This research informed multiple entries across the compendium and was presented to audiences at the University of Essex, the Refugee Care Conference, the U.S. Department of State, and elsewhere, each time foregrounding Palestinian voices and centring lived experience as the primary source of knowledge.
A significant strand of this work also engages specifically with climate-induced displacement, a context that is both distinct from and deeply intertwined with conflict-driven and protracted displacement. Its roots in Dr. Neumark’s practice predate HGL itself: in 2014, they conducted an initial interview with Denise Thornton, founder of the Beacon of Hope initiative in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, which first revealed how early attention to home beautification could be foundational to community recovery after climate disaster. As extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and environmental degradation force growing numbers of people from their homes, the psychological consequences extend beyond physical loss to include solastalgia, the particular grief associated with environmental change and the destruction of place attachment. The 2024 Ecopsychepedia article on aesthetics, climate displacement, and mental health, co-authored with Stephanie Acker and Denise Thornton, drew on neuroaesthetics, environmental psychology, and place attachment theory to argue that community-driven beautification offers displaced people concrete pathways to process climate grief, rebuild a sense of home, and restore collective resilience. This strand of the work reflects a broader conviction running through the compendium: that as climate displacement accelerates, humanitarian frameworks must expand to recognise the role of beauty, cultural expression, and environmental belonging as dimensions of recovery that are no less urgent than physical shelter.
By 2024 and 2025, the neurobiological framing of the argument became increasingly central as the work was presented to audiences in clinical and academic settings. Drawing on conversations with psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson and on neuroaesthetics research, the presentations explained precisely why acts of beautification reduce amygdala-driven fear responses, support prefrontal cortex functioning necessary for imagining a future, and enable hippocampal memory consolidation, culminating in the October 2025 presentation at Johns Hopkins University’s neuroaesthetics programme where the entire argument was reframed as survival infrastructure. Alongside this deepening of the neurological argument, the work broadened its justice framing, explicitly incorporating the language of aesthetic equity and aesthetic justice and recognising that who holds power over how spaces look and feel is not a neutral question but one with profound implications for dignity, self-determination, and the right to participate in cultural life as protected under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The October 2025 presentation at Clark University’s Designing Just Cities course made this argument most explicitly, proposing aesthetic justice as a necessary foundation for designing cities built not only for survival but for flourishing. Philosopher Michael Spicher’s observation that the Western devaluation of beauty can be traced directly to the destruction of the two World Wars, producing institutional cultures that systematically dismiss aesthetics as secondary, provides useful historical context for understanding why this argument still needs to be made at all.
Throughout this evolution, the work consistently encountered the same cluster of gaps and challenges in humanitarian practice: the systematic underfunding of community-led beautification initiatives; restrictive shelter modification policies that obstruct what displaced people are already doing; deficit-based narratives in media and fundraising that render displaced communities’ creativity invisible; the absence of aesthetic indicators in humanitarian monitoring and evaluation frameworks; and institutional cultures shaped by an uncritical reliance on Maslow’s Hierarchy that treat aesthetics as premature, non-essential, or irrelevant to serious humanitarian work. Taken together, these gaps represent the persistent conditions that motivated and continue to animate this body of work.
Displaced communities in the West Bank plant gardens and decorate their homes asserting agency and processing complicated emotions through physical expression. Cultivating Beauty in Contested Places, Phase II, Al-Azza Refugee Camp, West Bank.
Photo: Nizar ALayasa, 2024
The Case for Convergence
No single strand of evidence in this compendium would be sufficient on its own. Neuroscience without lived experience risks abstraction: it can explain the mechanisms of aesthetic engagement but cannot convey why a resident in Al-Azza camp tends flowers on an overcrowded balcony, or what it means to a 62-year-old man in Sindh to see traditional patterns painted on the walls of a house he spent his lifetime dreaming of building. Lived experience without neuroscience risks dismissal: it can document the universal human impulse to create beauty but cannot answer the institutional question of why this impulse deserves to be resourced rather than restricted. And both without participatory research risk speaking for communities rather than with them, perpetuating the very deficit-based frameworks the work seeks to dismantle.
What makes the case in this compendium compelling is precisely the convergence of these three streams. When Donald Ruggles explains that non-beautiful spaces activate chronic sympathetic stress responses with measurable physiological consequences, and Minar Thapa Magar shows how over one million families in flood-affected Sindh spontaneously painted traditional ralli textile patterns on their rebuilt homes without any external instruction, and a resident in Dheisheh camp describes how flowers on a balcony give passersby a sense of peace and stability, these three streams of evidence are not saying the same thing in different languages. They are each capturing something the others cannot, and together they produce an argument that is simultaneously biological, cultural, political, and practical. It is Alexis, a participant in Dr. Neumark’s doctoral research project Home Beautiful Revisited (2010), whose words have stayed with them for 15 years and whose voice is in many ways the origin of everything that followed, who gives that convergence its fullest meaning from the inside: “As refugees, we lose our sense of beauty, and when that happens, we lose our sense of everything. Of life itself.” That statement proved so precise and so complete in its articulation of what is at stake that it recurred throughout HGL’s public engagement as a touchstone, capturing in a single voice what the neuroscience, the policy research, and the participatory fieldwork together demonstrate. The result is a case that is harder to dismiss, more difficult to reduce to sentiment, and more directly actionable than any single disciplinary approach could achieve alone.
Photo Top: Blumont Group, 2013-2025
Photo Middle: UN-Habitat Afghanistan, 2025
Photo Bottom: Luxembourg Red Cross, 2025
Methodology and Transferability
HGL developed and refined several methodological innovations over the course of this work that are worth naming explicitly, both because they shaped the compendium’s findings and because they offer models that other researchers and organisations might adapt. The first is the research-creation methodology rooted in Dr. Neumark’s decades of practice as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, most fully developed in their doctoral work “Radical Beauty for Troubled Times: Involuntary Displacement and the (Un)Making of Home,” which integrates participatory, arts-based inquiry with rigorous scholarship, allowing displaced individuals to contribute to knowledge production through creative and embodied processes rather than only through interviews or surveys. The second is the systematic desk research approach developed by Stephanie Acker, which synthesised nearly 100 published articles on refugee homemaking across displacement contexts, providing an evidence base broad enough to demonstrate the universality of beautification practices across more than 30 countries and six different legal statuses. The third is the community dialogue methodology developed with Nizar ALayasa, whose 30 conversations in residents’ gardens and homes in Dheisheh and Al-Azza camps modelled how to generate deep contextual knowledge through sustained presence and trust rather than extractive data collection. The fourth is the use of pre-recorded multilingual video to centre participant voices in academic and professional settings, as demonstrated by Nizar ALayasa’s Arabic-language introduction at the Refugee Care Conference, which positioned him as a co-presenter rather than a research subject despite the constraints of an international conference format.
The three-part webinar series extended HGL’s collaborative methodology to its broadest scale, bringing together neuroscientists, architects, philosophers, documentary filmmakers, and field practitioners in ways that modelled the interdisciplinary convergence the work advocates. The series also demonstrated a reframing methodology with direct transferability: Ana Carolina Helena’s approach of advancing beauty through the language of sustainable construction and preventive healthcare, and Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez’s success in having local governments adopt the Casa Pintada methodology by framing it as violence prevention and public health, both illustrate how aesthetic arguments can be translated into institutional languages that open doors without compromising the underlying commitment to dignity and community agency. Organisations working in displacement contexts can draw on any of these methodological approaches, and the compendium’s consistent documentation of sources, named participants, and verified case studies provides a replicable model for evidence generation that other researchers and practitioners can adapt to their own contexts.
The compendium also reflects a consistent methodological commitment that deepened over time: the insistence on centring displaced voices rather than speaking on behalf of displaced communities. This commitment manifested in multiple ways across the entries: in Nizar ALayasa’s participatory dialogues and his pre-recorded Arabic video introduction at the Refugee Care Conference; in the naming of individual research participants including Basim, Qadir Bux, Raza Muhammad, Shabeeran Bibi, and Abla Abdel Hamid; in the framing of refugees as knowledge holders, co-presenters, and creative agents rather than research subjects or passive beneficiaries; and in the sustained critique of deficit-based narratives that frame displacement communities solely through trauma and loss. This methodological commitment is itself a form of aesthetic justice: an insistence that the people most affected by the conditions this work describes must be present in the conversation as authors of their own narratives, not objects of others’ analysis.
The Beautiful Resistance storytelling series, documented in the annex to this compendium, extended this methodological commitment to its fullest expression. Where the main entries centre displaced voices within the framework of academic and practitioner-facing research, the Beautiful Resistance series invited displaced and affected individuals to author their own narratives entirely, in their own words and from their own vantage points, without the mediating frame of research summary or policy argument. The result is a body of first-person testimony that stands alongside the compendium’s scholarly and professional entries as evidence of a different and equally rigorous kind: the knowledge that only lived experience can produce, offered directly and without translation.
Implications for Practice
Each entry in this compendium closes with a set of practitioner implications tailored to the specific audience addressed in that presentation or publication, and readers are encouraged to consult those sections directly for detailed and context-specific guidance. Across the compendium as a whole, however, several implications recur with sufficient consistency and urgency to warrant summary here.
For humanitarian practitioners and shelter coordinators, the core implication is that aesthetics must be treated as infrastructure rather than decoration from the earliest stages of response planning, embedded in needs assessments, programme design documents, shelter standards, and evaluation frameworks. Restrictive policies that prevent residents from modifying, personalising, and beautifying their living spaces should be reviewed and revised, recognising that such restrictions are not neutral but constitute measurable neurological and psychosocial harm. The most powerful reorientation available to practitioners, as Stephanie Acker observed in closing the final webinar session, is to stop asking where the problems are and start asking where the beauty already is, shifting from deficit to presence, and from problem to possibility.
For architects, urban planners, and designers, the implication is that beauty is not optional, but a professional responsibility grounded in the neuroscience of the autonomic nervous system. Design for displacement contexts should prioritise environmental enrichment, cultural expressiveness, adaptability, and community co-creation, drawing on neuroarchitecture research to inform decisions about proportion, natural materials, biophilic elements, and spatial flexibility. Evolutive shelter models that accompany communities through protracted displacement, as demonstrated by the Luxembourg Red Cross prototype in Chad, offer a practical framework for achieving dignity within tight budget constraints.
For policymakers, the implication is that Maslow’s Hierarchy must be actively dismantled as the implicit organising framework of humanitarian response and replaced with holistic frameworks that treat aesthetic experience, belonging, cultural expression, and dignity as simultaneous rather than sequential dimensions of recovery. Beauty should be recognised as a human right under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and embedded accordingly in national shelter guidelines, urban inclusion policies, and international frameworks including the Global Compact on Refugees.
For donors and funders, the implication is that community-led beautification initiatives should be recognised as legitimate and fundable humanitarian interventions, evaluated not only through speed and cost-efficiency but through indicators of social trust, agency, cultural continuity, and psychological recovery. The evidence from Casa Pintada in Colombia, where 95% of participants reported increased trust and solidarity, and from owner-driven reconstruction in Sindh, where over one million families rebuilt culturally expressive homes with modest financial support, demonstrates that the returns on aesthetic investment are both measurable and substantial.
Devora Neumark, Performance: Faire bon ménage.
Top: Amiens, France, 2014
Photo Top: Michelle Bélanger
Bottom: Basel, Switzerland, 2014
Photo Bottom: Renate Buser
Emerging Directions
Several priorities emerge clearly from the arc of this compendium and point toward where research and practice at the intersection of aesthetics, displacement, and humanitarian response most urgently need to go next.
The first is the urgent need to build a rigorous quantitative evidence base linking aesthetic design quality to measurable health, resilience, and community cohesion outcomes in displacement contexts specifically. As Carolina Helena observed, current evaluation in humanitarian settings relies primarily on self-reported satisfaction, leaving no robust basis for the institutional case for beauty. Closing this evidence gap, particularly on the mental health dimensions that remain under-researched in humanitarian settings, is one of the most consequential contributions that researchers working at the intersection of neuroaesthetics, architecture, and forced migration could make to the field.
The second is the development of aesthetic justice as a practical governance framework rather than an aspirational concept, translating the principle into concrete policy language, design standards, and institutional accountability mechanisms that give communities genuine power over the aesthetic dimensions of their built environments rather than token consultation.
The third is the expansion of hope-driven, community-led storytelling as a tool for narrative change at scale. Francisco Alcalá Torreslanda’s documentary We Name Ourselves demonstrated that storytelling which centres displaced people as agents, teachers, and changemakers generates audiences that connect through recognition rather than pity, which is more likely to shift institutional narratives and generate sustained public and political will. Developing platforms, funding streams, and professional norms that support this kind of storytelling broadly is both a communications priority and a justice imperative.
The fourth is the deeper integration of aesthetic considerations into climate displacement response specifically, as the scale and pace of climate-induced displacement accelerates and the limitations of purely material humanitarian response become increasingly apparent. The intersection of aesthetics, climate justice, and displacement remains an underdeveloped area of both research and practice, and the work in this compendium offers a starting point rather than a conclusion.
The compendium entries that follow are organised chronologically, spanning November 2023 to November 2025, and are grouped into three sections: publications, comprising five peer-reviewed and publicly accessible articles and policy documents; lectures, presentations, and webinars, comprising 11 public presentations and lectures and a three-part webinar series; and an annex, The Beautiful Resistance, comprising a global storytelling series in which displaced and affected individuals authored their own first-person narratives. Each entry in the publications and presentations sections is documented in a standardised format including keywords, a summary of the work and its context, key takeaways, and practitioner implications tailored to the specific audience addressed. Readers are encouraged to move through the entries sequentially to follow the intellectual arc of the work, or to navigate directly to entries most relevant to their professional context using the keywords and audience descriptors provided.
Taken together, the entries in this compendium represent a coherent and evolving argument: that beauty in the built environment is not decorative, not supplementary, and not premature. It is, as the evidence from neuroscience, participatory research, philosophy, and the lived experiences of displaced communities consistently demonstrates, foundational to recovery, dignity, identity, and the capacity to imagine and build a different future. The question this body of work poses to humanitarian practitioners, policymakers, designers, researchers, funders, and educators is not whether beauty in the built environment matters, but whether our institutions are willing to follow the lead of the communities that have known this all along.