Contribution short abstract:

The provocation reflects on the incommensurability and overlaps of undertaking professional care work and conducting research in grassroots migrant/refugee care settings. How can these mirroring spheres speak to each other to inform more equitable and inclusive research and care practices?

Contribution long abstract:

Professional care work with asylum seekers, often undertaken under the wider umbrella of humanitarian care, migrant/refugee collective care practices and Anthropological research share common ethics, grounded in principles ranging from 'doing no harm' to 'doing good'. However, these rarely enter into open, collaborative dialogue. Drawing from fieldwork conducted with self-organised migrant communities and humanitarian workers in central Athens where these diverse spheres interacted in the everyday, and my own journey from researcher to humanitarian employee and back again, the provocation intends to unpack institutional and methodological barriers, focusing on mutual learnings and potential cross-pollinations that could facilitate more collaborative, inclusive and equitable research and care provision.

Focusing on the 'bridging' capacity of solidarity (Rakopoulos 2016), both as a thinking lens, a form of action and a way of social relating running across them, it moves beyond conventional academic criticism to highlighting emergent forms of mutual identification and less visible practices of exclusion. These situated observations of practice-making offer the grounds to reflect on how we could transcend experienced 'malaise' by adopting practices that promote recognition and healing, mobilising their 'de-othering' potential and actively engaging in matters of justice.