This talk tells a story about life in displacement camps in wartime northern Uganda. A focus on women in campus reveals the subtle ways that campus are technologies of power, violence, and control over a population and how gender is an essential symbolic tool used by humanitarian organizations to construct notions of "bare life." However, in spite of this, campu dwellers, and women, in particular, negotiate these cirucumstances by finding fractures through which they create spaces of agency and empowerment.