Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the various levels and scales of responsibility invoked in debates over whether and how to meet the humanitarian needs of migrants and refugees stuck behind the EU border in Bihac, northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Paper long abstract:

For two years, residents of Bihac in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina have shared their small former industrial town with several thousand people on the move - refugees and migrants from outside Europe taking the Balkan Route between Turkey and the more prosperous countries of the EU. While most have no wish to stay in Bosnia, violent pushbacks by the Croatian and Slovenian border police have created a bottleneck of people now stuck outside the EU without money, phones, possessions, even shoes, and often also with serious injuries, compliments of the Croatian police. In Bihac, political pressure fueled by fear of young, mostly male "others" keeps the official camps from expanding capacity, while local police attempt to keep migrants from gathering in public spaces. But where should they stay? Why are these people here and how does that shape our responsibility to them? Who should feed, clothe, and house them? Based on ethnographic research in Bihac, this paper will map the vectors of responsibility towards the humanitarian needs of migrants through social media comments and everyday conversations among residents with an eye to unpacking the various levels of governance and scales of geopolitical interests that residents look to to assign ultimate responsibility for migrants as both security risks and humanitarian objects. I argue that these evaluations of scale and governance are reshaping and crystalizing citizens' relationship to the postwar state and its many fragments, as well as their sense of (semiperipheral) belonging to a re-racialized (white, Christian) Europe.

Paper short abstract:

The UN High Commissioner declared a hidden genocide of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. This paper discusses how white feminism becomes a form of settler-humanitarianism that governs the frontlines of gender-based violence programs that perpetuates Indigenous genocide.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations High Commissioner has declared that the prevalence of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada is a hidden genocide. In 2019, the Final Report into the National Inquiry of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was released, which includes 231 calls to justice to prevent the genocide from continuing. The report indicates a large span of land in the province of British Columbia called the Highway of Tears, where a high percentage of Indigenous women go missing. The provincial government funds transition house programs for women to access emergency housing when fleeing violence. Beginning in the 1980s, transition houses and crisis lines in BC were founded on feminist humanitarianism, which continues to underscore the sector that is now provincially funded. A high percentage of Indigenous women use transition houses across British Columbia. Under the premise of feminism, when do the actions of transition house workers become a neoliberal articulation of "settler-humanitarianism" (Wolf 2006)? In this paper, I argue that BC transition houses not only give an impression that the neoliberal government is trying to ameliorate violence against Indigenous women, transition houses play a part in sustaining a settler-state through its policies, protocols and paperwork that co-terminously create and monitor subjects of the neoliberal settler-state constellation. Furthermore, I show how white feminism becomes a form of settler-humanitarianism that governs the frontlines of gender-based violence programs that thwart Indigenous women from accessing safe shelter, and thus can play a part in unsafe system that perpetuates the genocide.

Paper short abstract:

My analysis reflects upon impacts of scale and space on the provision of hospitality in a 'house of hospitality' in Chicago, the ethics and complexities behind impulses towards modes of helping, and the negotiation of a third site between the impulse to help and organisational strictures.

Paper long abstract:

My field site was a 'house of hospitality' serving as a transitional shelter in Chicago, within the context of the Catholic Worker movement in the USA. The house was a residence not only to displaced families, but also volunteers. I analyse how hospitality - a poetics of relationality and management of alterities - is engaged with the (majority) undocumented families and volunteers living in close proximity to one another. Through ethnographic examples, I examine the ethics and complexities behind hospitality. Many families resided in the house because they escaped abusive, violent and/or unhappy homes - which in turn encouraged the affective management of warm sociality from the volunteers. This impacted the management and allocation of resources and engagement with strangers who sought help. This paper investigates how the management of this house affected the provision of help - particularly to people other than the residents, who were not officially the 'recipients' of help within the scale of the house's physical and organisational strictures. I analyse a 'third site' negotiating between the impulse to help and the fulfilment of duties following official regulations that may impede this impulse. While my analysis reflects attendant concerns and anxieties of a particular time and space, I focus on how the scale and space of the 'house of hospitality' affected and impacted discursive and relational structures behind the management of alterities and consequent implications for the way the 'stranger' is responded to.

Paper short abstract:

In this talk, I will use examples from my ethnographic work in Bangalore, India with the education NGO Adhyaapaka to excavate the figure of the "brown savior". A focus on the brown savior allows us to attend to the ways that new racial subjects have emerged as the help economies have proliferated.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk, I will use examples from my ethnographic work in Bangalore, India with the education NGO Adhyaapaka to excavate the figure of the "brown savior". The brown savior is a figure that reveals the contradictions in the contemporary help economy: on the one hand, they are not white and therefore do not seem to carry the baggage of white/western led help interventions. Yet they mobilize many of the same tools as their white counterparts - technical knowledge, corporate backing, and transnational movement, which reproduce neocolonial racialized binaries along the axis of the savior and the saved.

Racialization as an analytical focus has been largely absent from theoretical engagements with the 21st Century help economies, especially in nation-states like India which have been seen as "outside" of global racialization. But what is important to remember is that the history of help all over the world, including in India, is inflected by colonial histories which, from its inception, produced racialized subjects along a savior/saved binary. This paradigm remains largely intact. However, much of the focus in both public and scholarly discourse has been on the racializing of those who are "in-need of saving". At the same time, much less attention has been paid to the racializing processes that produce saviors. This is why a focus on brown saviors is theoretically useful, allowing us to attend to the ways that new racial subjects have emerged as the help economies have grown over the past fifty years.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of the migrant 'crisis' in France, we compare need and response in large-scale refugee reception centers on the one hand and small-scale community level programs on the other. We discuss humanitarian actions in these contexts, exploring how they are impacted by questions of scale.

Paper long abstract:

We are positioned through our work as social scientists and as activist/humanitarian volunteers working in different contexts in France, to explore and comment on the question of scale posed in this panel. One of us (Evangeline) has conducted dissertation field research on European reception centers for migrants and refugees, sites of national and international humanitarian intervention, where global tensions of identity, belonging and human rights are made manifest. In contrast, Shukti works with associations connected to municipalities and local communes in the Paris region, where volunteers welcome and socially 'integrate' refugee and migrant Others by helping them acquire necessary linguistic and cultural communication skills. Whether at this level of grassroots community initiatives or at the larger level of national and international organizations working in border regions between states, individual actors demonstrate solidarity and humanity in their interactions with the Other. We are interested in better understanding the common experiences that bind these different social actors/agents and motivate their humanitarian impulses, while also understanding the specific challenges and issues particular to these different contexts of aid that affect their benevolent actions. In this paper we engage with differences of scale in terms of: modes of helping in these different contexts, especially with respect to the ratio of need versus responders; communicative practices embedded in these different frameworks; and cultural ideologies of belonging and nation that motivate different forms of humanitarian action and intervention.