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- Convenors:
-
Tess Altman
(University of Southampton)
Ekatherina Zhukova (Lund University)
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- Discussants:
-
Nell Gabiam
(Iowa State University)
Elzbieta Drazkiewicz (Maynooth University)
Carna Brkovic (University of Mainz)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel considers how global, national, and local scales and public and private spaces impact upon manifestations of the humanitarian impulse. Do particular scales and spaces affect the extent to which humanitarian actors feel a sense of belonging and responsibility to respond?
Long Abstract:
Ethnographic research into the impulse to help suffering "others" has gained traction over the past decade, responding to Malkki's (2015) call to attend to "humanitarian subjects" (those who help) as closely as we do to the recipients of help. Such investigations have political importance in a time of hostile migration policies and public displays of xenophobia, hinting at potentially solidaristic moral sentiments. However, scholars have also critiqued the "dark side" of humanitarian efforts as a form of governance, at both institutional (Fassin 2012) and personal (Braun 2017) levels. This panel follows a recent line of enquiry into how humanitarian expression is affected by scale. Brković (2017) has termed this "vernacular humanitarianism"— everyday modes of helping influenced by specific social and cultural norms and practices. We extend this observation to consider how different scales (i.e., global, national, local) and spaces (i.e., public and private) impact upon the humanitarian impulse. In particular, do scale and space affect the extent to which humanitarian actors feel a sense of belonging or responsibility? Contributions may address, but are not limited to:
· The effect of scales, (e.g., global, national, regional, local) on humanitarian action.
· The impact of space, (e.g., private, public, domestic, professional) on humanitarian relations.
· The role of proximity and distance in inciting feelings of obligation, belonging or responsibility.
· Interactions between modes of helping at/in different scales/spaces (e.g., local and international volunteers/NGOs).
· The impact of scale and space on recipients of humanitarianism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I examine the practices of translation, comparison and scale-making through which individual cases of harm are aggregated into pictures of humanitarian crisis and suffering that justify intervention through the European Human Rights convention system.
Paper long abstract:
Scholars have argued that scale-making is a semiotically- mediated process for organizing social contexts through categories of space, size, and hierarchy. These processes ultimately rely on comparison and contrast. As Diane Nelson has argued, it is through such scale-making that individual experiences are represented as quantities and qualities that justify humanitarian and human rights intervention. In this paper, I examine the practices of translation, comparison and scale-making through which individual cases of harm are aggregated into pictures of humanitarian crisis and suffering that justify human rights intervention. Focusing on cases of enforced disappearance, I examine the practices of aggregation and inference through which Court actors and applicants translate individualized cases of harm into pictures of mass harm that require more robust forms of international intervention and adjudication. I show how legal remedies at the European Court of Human Rights require isolating individual cases of harm within the atomizing logic of human rights. But addressing and implementing judgements requires creating more comprehensive and nuanced pictures of loss and suffering to justify structural interventions and oversight. In this the European Court and the execution process is an exemplary site to analyze how differently individualizing and collectivizing logics of human rights and humanitarian suffering overlap.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores transformations and practices of the local refugee aid workscape since the 2015/2016 refugee corridor onwards. Special attention is placed on affective labor performed by local employees and volunteers working in humanitarian NGOs in Croatia.
Paper long abstract:
Amid the complex dynamics of late capitalism´s work transformations characterized by the expansion of precarious, flexible and immaterial labor, a significant increase of the NGO sector, together with various humanitarian initiatives, has been recorded, featuring both, the professional and the vernacular formulations of aid. Having in mind the transformations of (humanitarian) work, this paper is specifically interested in the local aid workscape enhanced by the recent refugee movements within Croatia´s coercive border regime. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two local NGOs, and the interviews conducted with humanitarians working in various aid organizations from the 2015 and 2016 refugee corridor onwards, the goal of the paper is to explore features and particularities of such a workscape with an emphasis on the labor invested by local humanitarians. Emotional engagement that I encountered among my interlocutors will be explored by using the concept of affective labor which will provide an insight into dialectics between the emotional and rational apprehensions of aid. With regard to the emotionally taxing and precarious working environment, experiences of local employees and volunteers will offer an insight into the ways humanitarianism enacts on a local scale. More specifically, the focus lies in the analysis of the ways the local refugee aid workscape adopts, reflects and/or challenges the dominant trends of the international aid industry.
Paper short abstract:
Participants of an annual Solidarity Festival in a Paris suburb push against negative images of the outer-city that diminish the force of their vision for a more just world, raising questions about the interests such images sustain.
Paper long abstract:
Frequently portrayed as sites of breakdown and disorder, the disadvantaged French suburbs are less well known for their flourishing pluralism and dynamic associational life. In this paper I focus on a Solidarity Festival that takes place once a year in the city where I work outside of Paris. A fortnight of events that echoes recurrent themes from around the city, the Festival brings together local grassroots actors, officials, and international delegates for a series of film screenings, debates, international exchanges and performances that extol the city's diversity and celebrate its transnational ties. At once a spurn to dominant images of the suburbs that focus on immigration and economic hardship, the Festival is also a moment of affirmation for the several hundred local participants whose humanitarian engagements bear witness to the anguish of displacement and their desires to maintain meaningful connections to their erstwhile homes.
For its participants the Festival constitutes a powerful moment of communitas. Animated by visions of a more just and united world, the Festival pushes into stark relief the urgent appeal on the part of many to resist and surpass the ambient norms that reduce such actions to feel-good instantiations of diversity and doing-good, and raises compelling questions about the political and social interests that conspire to keep such norms in place.
Paper short abstract:
This paper compares sanctuary city organising by humanitarian actors in San Francisco, Toronto and Sheffield arguing that care and 'holding space' are crucial for transformative politics by and for residents with precarious migration status in the city.
Paper long abstract:
Worldwide, anti-migrant movements are growing. National governments in North America and Europe have adopted policy goals of creating hostile environments for non-citizens creating a politics of fear and 'internal borders' (Yuval Davis 2018, Back 2019). Alongside, an outpouring of volunteerism and alternative practices and discourses have emerged, particularly in cities. Balancing a national 'hostile environment' and localised 'sanctuary movement', city actors create new imaginaries and practices of urban belonging. This paper specifically addresses the scale of the 'city' in humanitarian organising for undocumented residents. By comparing sanctuary city organising by humanitarian actors in San Francisco, Toronto and Sheffield this paper argues that care and 'holding space' are crucial for transformative politics by and for residents with precarious migration status in the city.
This presentation analyses the political and moral economy of 'sanctuary' practices comparing urban policy making, immigrant rights advocacy and faith-based organising. A defining feature of sanctuary is the narrative of belonging that is mobilised based on an ethics of care enacted within everyday life. Care is crucial to forms of 'commoning' that create insurgent urban citizens. The paper presents the notion of care as a form of prefigurative politics by promoting social relationships of mutuality and responsibility that strive to reflect a future society that activists hope to create. Care reinforces the importance of the collective, of social relatedness that is inextricably linked to bodies in place and drawing on the past, present and potential futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses what motivates local citizens in Norway to engage, as volunteers, in activities aimed at welcoming newly arrived refugees and other immigrants, how they view their engagement, and how civil society engagement relates to integration politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of activities aimed at welcoming and assisting newly arrived refugees and other immigrants settle into their new/host communities and connecting them with locals in Norway. The paper explores, first, how individuals among the local population envision these activities, what motivates them to engage as volunteers, to what extent they conceive of them as political or not, and how this shapes their engagement. Issues relating to the emergency response at the time of heightened refugee arrivals to Norway in 2015 - including the question of letting refugees and asylum seekers into the country at all - were often framed in terms of solidarity and responsibility as a rich country. Longer-term engagement with settled newcomers was, however, typically motivated by concerns with inclusion, integration and social cohesion at the local community level. Some volunteers described the activities as apolitical (and therefore appealing to them), yet authorities and politicians hail their significance for integration efforts and promote them to that end. The paper thus considers the role of voluntary engagement in relation to integration politics, and the extent to which such activities, aiming to provide newcomers with the tools (language skills, cultural codes) necessary to thrive in Norwegian society, may reflect and internalize state integration discourse and concerns. I also assesses how the structure of these civil society initiatives may at times reproduce some of the unequal power dynamics highlighted by critics of humanitarianism (Ticktin 2011, Fassin 2012).